If you're an informed observer of media, you may have heard of the so-called Bechdel test, popularized by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, that's used to judge the female-friendliness of movies and other media. For a movie to pass this test, it has to have:

(1) two or more female characters;
(2) who talk to each other;
(3) about something other than a man.

Despite this being such a low hurdle - it doesn't establish that the movie is in any way feminist, merely that it treats women as something more than an appendage or love interest of the male characters - it's amazing how many movies fail it. And once you're aware of this test, it's easy to notice when a movie doesn't pass. This makes it a classic example of consciousness-raising: it highlights Hollywood's tendency to create movies where women exist only in relation to men and not as individuals in their own right.

This is such a useful way of highlighting bias, I think it's worth creating a similar test for religion, to help believers notice sexism in their churches they might not have noticed. My suggestion is as follows. For a religion to pass this test, it has to have:

(1) at least one woman in a position of authority;
(2) who plays a formal, recognized role in shaping doctrine or practice;
(3) that is binding on male members of that religion.

Let me further explain the meaning of these tests. The first asks whether a religion has any roles of authority - any official position within the church that carries power - that are open to women, or whether female members are restricted to being lay members with no power. The second asks whether that authoritative role confers any power to actually define what will be the canonical elements of that religion - to issue decrees, to define the correct interpretation of holy books, to vote on church reforms, to shape official practice - and the like, or whether the only duties of that position are to passively transmit preexisting ideas. If women do have such authoritative roles, the third test asks whether they can set doctrine that applies to men who are members of that religion, or whether their decisions apply only to other women.

If a religion categorically excludes women from all positions of authority, it fails. If it gives women positions of authority, but only so that they can teach and pass on doctrine created by men, it fails. If it permits women to create doctrine, but doctrine that's only applicable to other women, it fails.

For instance, Islam, as it's currently practiced throughout most of the world, fails at the first criterion; women aren't permitted to be imams or to issue fatwas, or to do much of anything other than obey the dictates of men. The same is true of Mormonism, which deliberately bars women from its priesthood, of the Southern Baptists, and of Orthodox Judaism.

Roman Catholicism fails at the second criterion; it permits women to be nuns, thus passing the first test (if only barely). But cardinals, bishops and ultimately the Pope, the only church officials who can define what's authoritative in matters of belief and practice for Catholics, can only be men.

The conservative Anglicans currently threatening to break away from the rest of their church, meanwhile, would arguably fail at the third test. They wanted to permit women to be bishops only on the condition that a separate order of male-only bishops be created to minister to their congregations. This would imply that no male Anglican could be subject to a female bishop if he didn't want to be.

As with the Bechdel test, the mere fact that a religion passes this test doesn't mean that it's a feminist or egalitarian religion. It could still be appallingly sexist. It could still have rules that treat women as inferior to men. And it could still be harmful in any number of other ways. But I would argue that this test is the bare minimum - the first necessary, but not sufficient, step for any religion to genuinely treat women as equals.

By Ebonmuse

Before my flight leaves, I'm just dropping by to post a quick note: the newest (June/July 2010) issue of Free Inquiry magazine contains an original article by me, "Diplomats and Rabble-Rousers". The article discusses my views on the New Atheist movement and those who criticize it, pointing out that our accommodationist opponents are overlooking a basic lesson from history about what makes social reform movements successful. Go check it out! I'll post a web link at a later date if one becomes available.

While we're on the topic of science and the public, I came across another opinion poll worth mentioning: a survey released this month by Pew, Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media, which analyzes how the public views scientific achievement and what professional scientists think of how their work is covered in the media (HT: Obsidian Wings). There's lots to chew over in this report, but I want to focus on this section, which shows how many ideas that are accepted by an overwhelming majority of scientists do not enjoy similar levels of support from the public:

There are a couple of things we can take away from this, but here's the first one: The media is not doing its job. Just as we lambaste the food industry when people come down with mass E. coli infection from tainted meat or contaminated greens, so too do media outlets deserve criticism when the public whom they serve believes demonstrably false things about the nature of our country or our world. This, like outbreaks of food poisoning, is a sign that there's been a failure of quality control somewhere along the line.

The media is supposed to inform the public and communicate the truth about important issues. Instead, in their pursuit of the illusion of balance, many media outlets have taken the stance that their job is to be stenographers to the powerful - writing down opposing views in he-said-she-said fashion, without making any effort to adjudicate between them or to point out which viewpoint finds support in the facts. This intellectual laziness too often masquerades as "fairness". In fact, it's a victory for ideologues who oppose the scientific consensus - creationists, climate-change deniers, and others - and who can win a debate merely by creating an artificial controversy and preventing the truth from becoming widely known.

But scientists aren't entirely blameless either. Although they're right to complain about sloppy or sensationalistic news coverage, scientists themselves should be doing more to convey their views to the public. Our goal should be a culture where public communication - writing books, giving talks and interviews, blogging, and furthering science-themed media outlets - is viewed as an important part of a scientist's career, not as a frivolous adjunct or a distraction from the really important work. Pushing back against pseudoscience, and creating an educated, scientifically literate public, is by far the best solution to the problem that scientists mention the most: the chronic lack of funding and support for basic research.

To close the science gap, we need a competent media and an active, engaged scientific community. Where either of these is lacking, fundamentalism and other forms of antiscience sprout like weeds. As a society, we've made tremendous progress in coming to understand the world we live in; that's the legacy of the Enlightenment. Now we need to see that those discoveries are communicated to the public as a whole, and are not just the domain of professional scientists.

My recent post on Project Steve brought several comments arguing that it's pointless to take a survey of scientists, like this one from Freidenker:

Frankly, I have no idea whatsoever how many scientists accept or reject evolution, and furthermore - it doesn't matter: even if all scientists all over the world rejected evolution, the evidence for evolution is still there.

...to really survey the scientific community for evolution support is truly a stupid thing to do: popularity has no bearing on scientific validity.

Reasonable as this sounds, I believe it's misguided, and in this post I'll try to explain why.

If we were waging a debate in the peer-reviewed literature, trying to convince other scientists to accept evolution, then citing the evidence would be the thing to do. But this isn't a scientific debate; as we should all well know, creationists are not scientists, and have no interest in evidence. They're advancing a religious belief which they hold regardless of what the facts say. Moreover, their objective is not to freely convince scientists, but to bypass the process of peer review altogether, and to directly force their beliefs to be taught in schools by lobbying school boards and legislatures.

In short, creationism is not a scientific movement, but a public-relations movement. Their goal is not to change scientists' minds - for how could they possibly convince the experts? - but to influence the public's perception. And to be victorious, we have to fight them on the same ground.

If we try to make the case for evolution solely by citing the evidence, we're playing into the creationists' hands. They can easily respond by saying, "That's very interesting, but we have lots of evidence of our own. The [cell/bacterial flagella/bombardier beetle/blood clotting cascade/take your pick] is so complex it couldn't possibly have evolved on its own! There must have been a Designer. Teach the controversy!"

Against laypeople and the uninformed - and, unfortunately, school boards and legislatures include generous quantities of each - this is an effective line of attack. A person who lacks the expertise to evaluate the scientific evidence, and to see that the creationist case is hogwash, will come away with nothing but the impression that both sides have good evidence of their own, so why not be fair and teach them both? It's this superficial sense of fairness that the creationists count on.

To defeat this tactic, it's not enough to cite evidence that the creationists can counter with "evidence" of their own. What we need is to go further and show that there is no genuine controversy, that real, practicing scientists are all but unanimous in their support of evolution, and more, that creationists have avoided laying their case before the people best qualified to evaluate it.

That's why efforts like Project Steve, lighthearted as they are, make an important point. Ordinary people may not know much about the scientific method, but they respect the authority of scientists. Laypeople may be ill-prepared to decide the merits of dueling arguments, but when they see that all the scientists line up on one side, that is something they can understand. This is why creationists fight so hard to give the impression that plenty of real scientists support creationism - and we must not concede that point to them! It's vital to show that their list of "scientists who doubt Darwinism" is, in reality, just a minuscule and carefully cultivated minority of dissenters, one that's swamped by the overwhelming tide of working scientists who not only accept evolution but rely on it in their work every day.

Yes, we should present the evidence for evolution - strongly and comprehensively. We should always be ready to show the public the many wonderful transitional fossils we've found. We should always be ready with evidence of new mutations that increase genetic information, new and incipient species in the process of formation, and maps of gene trees that illustrate the nested hierarchy of descent. But to supplement all this evidence, we must also be prepared to prove that these arguments actually have convinced scientists, and that the creationists' arguments have not. Only this two-pronged strategy can effectively undermine the creationist case and win acceptance of evolution in the eyes of the public.

I've put up a new post on Dangerous Intersection, "A 24-hour news network lineup I’d like to see".

This is an open thread.

Regular readers of Daylight Atheism may recall how this site became involved in the U.S. Senate race in North Carolina last October. Trailing in the polls and running low on money, Republican senator Elizabeth Dole quoted Daylight Atheism in anti-atheist smear ads in a last-ditch attack aimed at her Democratic challenger Kay Hagan. Thankfully, Dole's brazen appeal to bigotry was an utter failure, and Election Day saw her defeated and Hagan victorious.

Now Dole's campaign manager, Marty Ryall, has written a post-mortem of the campaign and the infamous "Godless" ad. You would think that a decent and honorable person would express contrition over making such a shameless play for the bigot vote, that they would feel remorse for allowing desperation to drive them to such a low. But if you thought any of those things were true in this case, you don't know the modern Republican party.

Far from feeling regret, Ryall defends the Dole campaign's decision to air the ad. He acknowledges that it was risky and that he might have designed it somewhat differently if he'd had the chance to do it over, but he insists that the basic strategy was sound:

We had polled the issue in mid-September and found that it tested very well among the key groups that we needed to win. We needed to raise intensity among Republican voters, as well as shift the focus of Independents and conservative Democrats from our negatives to Kay Hagan in an unfavorable way. We needed something that had some shock value and would also generate an earned media component — and that was the "Godless" issue.

Ryall doesn't regret the ad because it contained claims that were blatant lies (atheists want to "eliminate the Christmas holiday"), or because he now realizes it's wrong for politicians to run campaigns by appealing to prejudice, or even because atheists proved to be a more influential political constituency than they had counted on. No, the only thing Marty Ryall says he regrets is not running the ad sooner!

I would argue that had we run the ad sooner, and without the voice at the end, it would have been closer. However, that is all hindsight.

It's clear that the Dole campaign, and the Republican party in general, have learned nothing whatsoever. Ryall attributes Elizabeth Dole's loss solely to the increased Democratic turnout, but never stops to consider what drove that turnout in the first place. Yes, the Obama campaign invested a lot of effort in getting voters to the polls, but the whole reason why that approach was so successful was that so many voters were fed up with the state of the country and willing to vote for a change of course. And why was that sentiment so widespread?

A look back at the eight years of the Bush presidency would readily reveal the answer to that question. The Republicans who were in power throughout most of that time, when they weren't violating Constitutional rights or waging preemptive wars at staggering cost, spent most of their time stoking the flames of the culture wars: demonizing their political adversaries, inflaming their base with shrill invective, cramming fundamentalist Christianity down the populace's throats, and churning out a ceaseless drumbeat of appeals to prejudice, hatred, and fear. They did all these things at the expense of governing, and the American republic suffered for it. Small wonder that American voters were sick and tired of their constant demagoguery, and ready to vote for candidates who could deliver meaningful solutions to actual important issues.

Ryall's article demonstrates the precise attitude that laid low Elizabeth Dole and so many other Republicans: that their fault wasn't in their philosophy, only in its execution. If only we'd worked a little harder at slandering atheists, he claims, we'd have won. I think the fact that they worked so hard at slandering atheists in the first place says a lot about their misguided priorities, and their defeat can be directly attributed to their failure to understand that.

We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

A recent poll by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute found, as many previous surveys have found, that Americans' knowledge of political and historical facts about our country is abysmal. But this one added a twist - it surveyed elected officials as well as ordinary citizens, and found that their knowledge of the same facts was, if anything, even worse. (You can take the quiz yourself.)

I'm astounded that elected officials didn't do better than the average person. This is a worrying development that suggests the pervasive anti-intellectualism in our society is making its way into government. With some of these questions - for instance, the question about which branch of government has the power to declare war - the incorrect answers can likely be blamed on the influence of a right-wing movement that's actively hostile to the ideas of judicial review and separation of powers. But many of the questions have no such ideological implications, and wrong answers can only be blamed on a more general hostility to empirical knowledge, education and other positive qualities commonly scorned in the media as "elitism".

Photo courtesy of UMKC's Scopes trial page.

Commenters like Susan Jacoby have noted the pernicious effects of dumbing down our civil discourse, making us less able to evaluate the policy choices we face as a democratic nation. But worse than not knowing is the attitude that we don't need to know - that subjective certainty or ideological dogma can stand in for consensus, empirical knowledge about the way the world works. Religious faith is a special offender in this regard, teaching as it does that authority or tradition is a sufficient reason to believe something, and often praising believers as virtuous for believing things that are contradicted by the evidence. An ignorant, poorly educated society is fertile soil for every kind of superstition. Conversely, less educated people are far more likely to believe in ideas such as miracles, demons, and biblical literalism. (See also.)

Anti-intellectualism is nothing new, of course. There's always been a strong undercurrent of it in American society, one that dates back at least to the Scopes trial, and it's not a surprise that belligerently anti-science regions of the country elect representatives who act in kind. That's not new, but what is new is that our society - stretching the limits of what Earth's resources will support - is increasingly dependent on science and technology, and increasingly beset with problems, such as global climate change, that only scientific understanding will give us a hope to comprehend or solve. As the stakes get higher, we can less and less afford to have irrationalism poisoning the public debate and swaying our policy choices. The risk is too great that it will lead us astray at a critical moment.

The problem of anti-intellectualism has no easy solution, particularly when so many people take pride in their ignorance rather than viewing it as something to be ashamed of. Improving public schools is necessary, but at best it treats a symptom rather than a cause. What we need more is a return to the attitude that being intelligent and educated is a good thing which people should aspire to.

This is part of the reason why atheists must take a greater role in public discourse. Religious liberals and moderates can and often do join with us on specific social issues - but even they, for the most part, take the position that faith is an acceptable way of making policy decisions. We have an altogether different message, and one that's far more vital: decisions that affect the common good must be made on the basis of reason. That's a message worth promoting, and that's why we should disregard the squawking of those pundits who urge atheists to keep quiet and not criticize religion, because it's "disrespectful". Our message, in the long run, is crucial and necessary; if we need to do damage to established superstitions to get it out, so be it.

I just have to boast: I'm on TV!

Well, sort of, anyway. Daylight Atheism commenter RiddleOfSteel has brought to my attention this clip, in which Richard Dawkins is interviewed for the Canadian TV program The Agenda. As we all know by now, my essay "The New Ten Commandments" is quoted in Dr. Dawkins' book The God Delusion, and about halfway through the clip (at around 4:10), the interviewer reads one of my ten commandments verbatim.

That being said, I have to raise a substantial objection to the way my work is actually used. The interviewer's line of questioning for Dawkins is the standard, tired "why are you atheists so disrespectful of other people's faith" strategy. To my dismay, he quotes my third commandment - "Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect" - and uses it to attack Dawkins in furtherance of this canard!

This is a serious misrepresentation of my views. I categorically did not mean by this that we should refrain from ever criticizing others or saying things that offend people's sensibilities. On the contrary, my ten commandments also include injunctions such as "Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you", and especially, "Question everything".

In fact, in my third commandment, I define precisely what I mean by "respect":

"Respect" mandates treating others as inherently valuable, not using them as tools or means to an end that may be cast aside and discarded once they have made their contribution.

There is nothing in there about not criticizing other people's beliefs, nor should there be. In fact, I would argue that it shows more respect for others - respect for their intelligence and their ability for independent thought - to speak our minds freely to them and let them evaluate our arguments, rather than censor ourselves out of some spurious idea of politeness.

Richard Dawkins is dead-on when he states that religious beliefs have historically been surrounded by an abnormally and unjustifiably thick wall of respect. We atheists ought to make it our mission to demolish that wall: to raise people's consciousness and cause them to realize that religious beliefs, no less than any other category of beliefs, should be open to inquiry and criticism.

I've put up a new post on Dangerous Intersection, "The traditional media is dying".

This is an open thread. Comments and discussion are welcome.

I recently finished watching Planet Earth, the award-winning BBC nature documentary series narrated by David Attenborough. As its title implies, Planet Earth is an effort of considerable ambition: the filmmakers set out to produce a series that would provide a survey of our world's natural grandeur and biodiversity. To a remarkable extent, I think they succeeded. Of course the full richness of Earth's biosphere could not be exhaustively chronicled, but this series touches on many of the high points. It sweeps across every region of the planet, documenting our world's remaining wildernesses and some of the more important species that live in them, in the process filming things that have never been caught on camera before. In its scientific breadth and scope, in the beauty it depicts, and in the reasons it gives us both to fear, and more importantly, to hope, Planet Earth compares favorably to Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

The series consists of eleven episodes, each of which chronicles a different type of ecosystem flourishing on our planet. Over the course of the series, we're taken from icy tundra and boreal forest to tropical jungle, from the rich shallow seas to the blackness of the ocean abyss, from soaring mountains to desolate deserts to the eerie dark worlds of the cave systems beneath the planet's surface. Each episode is fifty minutes, plus a ten-minute ending segment called "Planet Earth Diaries" that shows how some of the more difficult-to-obtain shots were filmed - a nice touch that gives one appreciation for the truly heroic dedication of the photographers who traveled to some of the most remote, wild areas of the planet, braving all manner of harsh and grueling conditions, and worked in some cases for weeks on end just to catch a few moments of action on film. Three additional episodes, collectively titled Planet Earth: The Future, make the case for conservation using footage from the series and interviews with prominent advocates for the environment.

But the focus of the show, as I said, is on the breathtaking natural beauty of our planet and the wonderful, intricate tree of life that flourishes upon it. I couldn't do justice to all the high points in this one post, but here are a few that particularly stood out to me:

• a snow leopard, one of our planet's rarest and most elusive predators, hunting twisted-horned markhor antelope in the Himalayas of eastern Pakistan - the first close-up images of snow leopards in the wild ever filmed;
• the vast precipice of Venezuela's Angel Falls, the world's highest waterfall - a sheer drop of nearly a kilometer, so high that the falling water is blown into mist before it reaches the bottom;
• Nile crocodiles exploding out of the water to grab migrating wildebeest crossing their river - the terrifying tenacity of the bull crocodiles is shown when one of them, after grabbing a wildebeest's leg in its jaws, wrestles with its unlucky prey for over an hour before finally dragging the wildebeest into the water and drowning it;
• parachute divers leaping into the sunlit shaft of Mexico's Cave of Swallows, a dizzying sheer drop deeper than the Empire State Building is tall;
• a male polar bear, starving and exhausted after a long swim in the open water of the melting Arctic, desperately attacking a herd of bull walruses;
• a spectacular sequence in which an entire pride of African lions hunts and kills an elephant;
• the elaborate courtship displays of New Guinean birds of paradise;
• a band of chimpanzees waging war on a rival tribe, slipping silently into their adversaries' territory before erupting in a furious charge of intimidating shrieks and hoots; the savage hand-to-hand fighting ends with the losers being torn apart and, in some cases, devoured by the winners;
• banded sea kraits - aquatic snakes - swimming as smoothly as eels to hunt fish among the coral reefs of the Pacific;
• Borneo's Deer Cave, where a flock of three million bats has created a guano mound the size of a large building, covered with swarming, voracious cockroaches;
• in the Azores, a school of hundreds of dolphins herding scad mackerel, working in unison to encircle their prey and drive them closer to the surface, where diving cory shearwaters soar down to share in the hunt;
• the lush communities of strange life that thrive around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, powered by the superheated plumes of mineral-rich water erupting from fissures in the crust, like oases in the abyssal dark. When these vents stop erupting, a whole community can collapse from vibrant life into a dead, frozen forest of tube-worm skeletons - a devastation treated by the film with all the gravity of an empire's fall;
• a vast flock of migrating Baikal teal - hundreds of thousands of birds, all flying in unison - and the camera pulls back, and back, and still further back, until each individual bird is just a tiny speck, and still the whole flock cannot fit on the screen at once;
• and last but not least, time-lapse shots of the seasons changing, even time-lapse shots from space that show rivers flood, forests turn green, snow and glaciers advance - I don't know how these were taken or whether they were special effects.

The one caveat I would offer is that Planet Earth is a nature documentary, which means most of the sequences are of animals doing what animals normally do in the wild. If you're the kind of person who finds that boring, you'll probably be bored by this as well. There are plenty of hair-raising moments, but the purpose of the show is not to keep viewers constantly on the edge of their seat. Personally, I found it a spectacular glimpse of some of the Earth's last remaining places of wild beauty. If that description appeals to you, then I can safely say that you'll love Planet Earth, and I would definitely recommend it.