Join us this spring for the sixth annual nexxus, the northeast largest conference dedicated to critical thinking and science education. It's all going down in New York City the weekend of April 11th through 13th 2014. We're excited to feature a keynote by physicist Lawrence Krauss, who's authored bestsellers like The Physics of Star Trek and who just started with Richard Dawkins in a new film last year called The Unbelievers. This is in addition to a great lineup of other speakers like Paul Offit, expert on vaccines and infectious disease, and Cady Coleman, veteran astronaut for NASA.

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Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, roughly speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host Musim Appeal YouTube. And with me, as always, is my co-host. Julia. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

Today, I am delighted to welcome a special guest, Greta. Christina is joining us for this episode. Greta is a professional writer, public speaker and activist. She's a regular correspondent for AlterNet Free Inquiry and the Human Rights of our own, very popular Greta Christina's blog, which is now part of free thought blogs. And she's just coming out with another book titled Coming Out Atheist How to Do It, How to Help Each Other and Why. Greta. Welcome to the show.

It's great to have you believe that we haven't had you on the show yet. I like when it occurred to me to invite you to talk about your new book. I almost dismissed the idea because I was like, well, we've had Greg on the show before, certainly. But then that I couldn't think of a single episode so better late than never. I don't think so. I'm very happy to be on the show. Thanks so much.

All right. So well, let me start with the obvious question, I guess, which is why is it necessary or is it a good idea to come out as an atheist?

Well, there's lots of reasons. It's a there's lots of reasons to a lot of really good answers to that question. The number one reason to come out as an atheist or some other non-believer is that for the overwhelming majority of people who have come out, they say that it makes their life better. It's just it is a better life to be out to be open about your atheism. And that's true even if you get bad reactions when you come out.

What I found, I interviewed or rather read accounts of I read coming out stories from over four hundred atheists, agnostics, humanists, etc, nonbelievers in writing this book. And literally of those over four hundred people whose accounts I read, only one person said that they regretted having coming out. Everybody else who after they came out as an atheist, said that their life was better. And that's true. Even if they got into fights with their family, even if they had problems at work, even if they really alienated people they were close to, they feel better.

They feel more more open. They feel more relaxed. They feel more liberated. They're not constantly trying to keep track of who knows what secrets about them and what they might do to them if they find out. And they're not constantly terrified of anything that they say on the Internet in case somebody might track it back to them. You know, once you're open about your atheism and the more open you are about your atheism, because being out, is it an either or thing?

It's a continuum. The more open you are, the more comfortable you are. And the more that I mean, yes, we live in a world where there's a lot of bigotry against atheists and a lot of hostility and a lot of myths and misinformation about us. But when we stay in the closet, we kind of internalize that and we kind of internalize other people's hostility towards us in the form of fear and anxiety about what happens when we come out.

Once we do come out, we reposition that hostility and bigotry back out into the world where it belongs. I mean, it doesn't belong anywhere, but to the degree that there's hostility and bigotry against us, it's to be other people's responsibility, not ours. And overwhelmingly, once people come out, it makes them happier. Now, there's some other good reasons to come out of the closet.

I'm sorry if I can interrupt you very quickly before you talk about the other good reasons to come out. I wanted to talk about something I particularly admired about your book when you were talking about the data that you collected for the book that that was so overwhelmingly pointing towards it, people being glad that they'd come out once they did. And what I admired was that you you sort of had some caveats there about the data itself. Would you would you mind talking a little bit about, like what kinds of grains of salt we should take that data with?

Absolutely.

That's a very that's a very good topic. There's actually an entire chapter in the book, right, about yes, I have all this wonderful data saying that coming out is a great idea, that it makes your life better. But there are some caveats about that. One of the main caveats about that is rationalization bias. Human beings, as I'm sure all of our listeners know, we have a particular cognitive bias, which is that once we've made a decision, we immediately start rationalizing why it was the right decision.

And that's especially true when we make a decision that has a really profound impact on our lives. It's pretty easy to admit that we made a small mistake. It's much easier. It's much more difficult when we make when we make a big mistake to acknowledge that we made a mistake. So once we've taken an action, we immediately start it persuading ourselves that it was right and I think that to some extent applies for coming out as well, that when people come out of the closet or, of course, we're going to say it was the right decision, we made that decision, of course.

And that's especially true if the decision had a very strong impact on our lives, if we did alienate friends and family, if it did create problems in our community, if it did create problems at work. We have a very strong cognitive bias towards persuading us that this was the right decision.

Now what I'm so sorry, but so far from what you said so far, the analogy is obviously inescapable, right. With with coming out as a gay or lesbian person. And for that one, I assume we actually have a significantly longer track record in terms of data, the facts and so forth. Do you know any about that? That analogy? I mean, does that then? I think, first of all, does it actually hold or does it you think superficial?

And second, if it does hold, you think that sociological data about that phenomenon may have something to tell us about coming out as an atheist?

I think that that analogy definitely holds is not a perfect analogy. Of course, no analogy is, but but yes, it's true. We have decades at this point of pretty good research on LGBT people showing that, yes, coming out makes lives better. That's not just rationalization bias. That's a real phenomenon. And I believe, although I don't have the research at my fingertips, that it's true for other quote unquote, invisible minorities, other people who are marginalized minorities in some way where you do have to come out, where it's not just obvious on the surface that there's lots of research showing that even again, even if it does generate hostility, that internalizing that hostility is harder on us emotionally and psychologically than just saying, yes, people are mad at us, but it's not I don't have to take that in.

So and there is actually some research on that, supporting that conclusion for atheists as well, although that's the sociologists are really just starting to really research atheists. And so it's there is some research backing this up showing that, yes, this isn't just rationalization bias, that people really do seem to be happier once they come out of the closet. The one again, you know, and I do think that this is a pretty strong conclusion. The one thing I would say is that, again, there are differences, important differences between coming out as atheists and coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual or trans.

And so, therefore, I don't want to automatically assume that because coming out LGBT makes your life better, that therefore, of course, coming out is better. Know there's important analysis. There's a lot of important similarities, but there's important differences as well. I would like to see more research done on this on atheists. That being said, I do think that between the research that does exist on atheists and the research that exists on LGBT people in other quote unquote, invisible minorities and also just a fair body of anecdotal data, I think that it's a pretty reasonable conclusion to to come to.

It's obviously worth reserving judgment about. And if lots of research comes in that shows me wrong, then I'll admit that I'm wrong. But I do think it's a pretty reasonable conclusion.

Yeah. So you had started to talk about about other reasons to come out as atheist, aside from it being plausibly good for your own personal happiness. What are those other reasons?

Well, one of the main other reasons is that it helps other atheists. This is one of the pieces of one of the most common things that I found when I was doing the research for this book and reading these hundreds and hundreds of coming out stories is that when we see other people who are out atheists or about other forms of nonbelievers, that makes it easier for us to come out of the closet.

Edit also, even if we don't come out of the closet, knowing that other atheist exists just kind of makes our own lives better in many ways, it makes us feel less alone. It makes us feel less isolated. It makes us less likely to internalize the negative messages that there are about us in the world. And also coming out is what makes it possible to do things like build a community. And the movement of coming out is what enables us to change other people's minds about us.

There's the whole context hypothesis thing. And again, this isn't just true for atheists. This is true for every marginalized minority. When people know, you know, a black person, when they know an LGBT person, when they know somebody who's Jewish or whatever their. Less likely to have bigotry and hostility against them. And so coming out is how we change people's perceptions of this. And again, this is something that is backed up with research and they have citations in the notes of the book, although I don't have them at my fingertips, that people's opinions of us goes up when they know what when they get to know us.

And. And this is, again, a way to make our own lives better. And it's a way to make life better for other atheists right now.

Now, let me interrupt you for a second there. So part of the idea, I would think maybe maybe that's where you are going next. But part of the idea is that not coming out because I know this is not just better for the person who comes out sort of personally as a personal experience.

It's not just better for, you know, it doesn't just help other atheists. But is the implication or is the suggestion somehow this is also sort of better for society at large? And if that's the case, of course, I would personally agree on it. But but that's a little more contentious because then the question is, well, in what sense is a good to have a bunch of idiots coming out whatever in society? For instance, we just just to play devil's advocate for a second here it is themselves often complain about the the fact that a lot of religious people are very vocal in the public square, especially in the political square, about their religiosity and so on.

And we think that a lot of us think that actually living in a secular, pluralistic society means that, you know, you keep your religious opinions to yourself. You're certainly entitled to it. But but there is a boundary where in the public square where there is less and less of a role to play for those opinions. Wouldn't the same kind of reasoning I mean, couldn't a religious person saying, well, same place the latest. And so really you have all the rights to be whatever you want.

But but perhaps the effects society wise, wide are not quite as clear cut. What's your thinking about that?

Well, a couple of thoughts about that. One is that I don't actually agree that a secular, pluralist society means we don't discuss religion in the public square. What I think secular, plural society means is that religion is out of government, very specifically, that religion is out of public policy. I would love to see people discuss religion in the public square. For one thing, I think religion is a bad idea. I think it's a mistaken idea.

And I think that if it really does get questioned in the public square, people tend to let go of it. That's again, one of the things that I see over and over again in the research that I've done for this book and also just in my life is one of the things the main things that gets people changing their minds about religion is just hearing about atheism and hearing arguments for atheism.

It's, you know, in a in a if there really is a good battle in the public arena, in the marketplace of ideas between atheists and religion. And if it's a fair fight, you know, if religion doesn't have all the privilege that it has, religion is going to lose. I mean, it's not going to lose right away, but I think it's going to lose in a few generations.

But that's very John Stuart Mill of you. And again, it's that religion does have a lot of privilege right now and it's not going to be an easy fight. But, um, but the main thing is that religion is an idea. And I don't think that a secular society means we don't discuss that idea. It just means that the idea is forced on us in unfair, privileged ways through government, through public policy or through just privileging in society.

So that's I guess that's one of the main things I would say. And again, the second point I would make is that, again, if you think that atheism is a good idea, if you think that it's correct, if you think that it's accurate, if you think that religion is mistaken and or that it's harmful idea, again, getting a theism into the public square, not even just by debating it or arguing or trying to talk people out of religion simply by coming out as atheists, that is a big part of what persuades people out of religion.

And this is, again, something that I found in the research for this book. You know, you talk with hundreds of atheists about why they changed their minds about religion. A lot of them will say simply meeting another atheist, simply seeing another atheist, simply seeing public figures who are atheists is part of what changed their minds about religion just because it never occurred to them that atheism was even an option and it never occurred to them that you could be an atheist and be a happy moral person.

And so seeing those role models is a lot of what changes people's minds about religion. Now, there is another problem.

Well, there is one more bias in my data that I think I do, to be fair, need to mention, and that's that. So I collected hundreds of coming out stories for this book. But those they weren't it's not a statistically careful sampling. I cast as wide net as I could when I was collecting coming out stories, but I didn't do it through. I didn't collect a statistically average sampling of atheists around the country and around the world.

I basically I put out a call on my blog for coming out stories. I got as many people as I could to publicize that call for stories. So it wasn't just people. It's not just people who read my blog, although they're certainly overrepresented. And that's a bias. People who read my blog are overrepresented in this book. I did get a lot of other people to distribute the call for stories pretty widely, and I also collected stories from other sources.

There's a website called The Coming Out Gödel's Project. I got stories from the Military Association of Atheists Freethinkers website from the Clergy Project. I read some stories on Reddit activism. There's some books about atheism that have a lot of coming out, stories that that I collected. So I did collect stories from a lot of different sources, but it's not a statistically representative. Sampling of certain groups are overrepresented. In particular, the group that's overrepresented is people who are connected in some way with organized atheism that is very much overrepresented.

And so it could be that there are people out there who came out as atheists whose lives were destroyed by the experience in their miserable about it. They're really sorry they did it. It was the worst decision they ever made in their lives. And I'm never going to hear this story because they don't read atheist blogs and they don't come to atheist conferences and they don't read atheist books and they don't you know, there's no way that they're going they're connected with the networks that get me their stories.

So right. Again, even with that bias, I still think that the conclusion that coming out improves your life is pretty is what I'm pretty comfortable saying that most of the time that's the outcome. But I do feel like if I'm going to be a good skeptic and a good rationalist, I want to pledge my biases. And that's an important one.

But if only we could we could get a group of a thousand closeted atheists together and have them agree to be part of a randomized controlled trial in which a randomly chosen half of those closeted atheists will agree to that they get heads and therefore come out to their family members and see what happens. Well, that should be easy. Yeah, I'm sure the Human Subjects Review Board that at any top university would be fine with that. Yeah. I'm so glad you started touching on on atheists.

I'm on on atheist communities. And that was actually the part of the book that I, I was most interested to read just because I personally don't, uh, I'm not facing the task of coming out as an atheist at this point in my life. But I am, however, interested in building a community of people interested in critical thinking and rationality. And one thing you said that that actually surprised me and intrigued me was that you think the common question of how can we as sort of secular community builders provide give people what religion traditionally gives people is a misguided question.

Can you say a little about why you think that question is misguided?

Well, it's not what that I think that it's misguided is that I think it's limited. I do think it's worth when we're building community, when we Birling community, we do have this tendency to say, what does religion provide? What are churches, synagogues, temples and so on? What is that providing for people so that when people leave religion, we can provide some or all of that. And I do think that that's worth looking at. But I think that when we do that, there's a couple of problems.

One is that it gives religion credit that it doesn't deserve. I don't actually think that religion, per say, provides anything for people other than religion, other than a belief in the supernatural, other than a belief in God, the afterlife, the soul and so on. Everything else that religion provides community and social support, economic support, ritual, tradition, continuity and so on. All of that is something that can be provided secularly. And I don't like to give religion credit.

Don't say what does religion provide because religion doesn't provide anything except a belief in the supernatural. But I think another reason why it's important to recast that is the way what I would like to see is asking, instead of saying what does religion provide is to simply say, what do people need? What needs are people, what needs do people have that we can meet? And one of the important reasons that I think we should recast that question is if there's a lot of needs that people have, that religion isn't meeting like, well, OK, one really good example, and this is example, just from my own experience in doing community is there is a there's a community that I'm involved in co-founded I'm organizing here in San Francisco called the Godless Perverts.

And what the Godless Perverts does is it's a community that's organized around the intersection of atheism and sex and sexuality. And we do performance events and social meet ups where we explore the intersection of sex and sexuality with atheism, with skepticism, with science and also with religion from an atheist viewpoint. So we have these performance events where people read sexual fiction and nonfiction and poetry and so on. We have these meet ups where we are comfortable talking about sex pretty explicitly.

If we'd been looking at what does religion provide for people come up with that, that's not something that with a tiny, tiny handful of exceptions, religion provides. Right. And so I think that if we instead of saying what does religion provide, we just say, what do people need that allows us to be a little bit more nimble as organizers, a little more flexible we can. And also, what people need varies a lot depending on region.

And what atheist specifically need varies a lot depending on region. You know, what we need here in San Francisco is really different from what people need in, say, Omaha or Dallas, parts of the world where religion is a really dominating force in the social life, economic life and the political life where if you leave religion, you really are just going to be alienated. There's not going to be anything for you to do. This is not going to be any kind of support network.

People need, I think, a lot more of the specific things that religion provides or is in places like San Francisco, New York, Seattle, London, Berlin. I think that what nonbelievers need is a little bit different because there isn't religion isn't such a dominating force in our lives. And so there's not that. Oh my gosh, without my church, I'm completely helpless. I have no friends or family or networking. So if we look at just what do people in our area need and want, I think we're a little better able to do more flexible organizing.

But speaking of places where let's say they may not be so, they may not be so friendly environments, you do talk to them for coming out as an atheist. You do mention places like, let's say, the US military or even more obviously a theocratic country. Is that really a good idea to come out as an atheist? And I don't know, Iran, for instance, or to come closer to home? As I said, you know, the US military or other organizations within even the United States are not necessarily atheist friendly places.

Now, one can argue that that's even more reason to sort of take a stand. But but but that may get into issues of life quality for the person who does take that step and so on and so forth. And as I said, these kinds of issues become even more crucial, sort of acute when we're talking about an actual theocratic country. So what what what do you suggest in that area?

Well, those are two really different questions. I do actually have entire chapters on coming out. If you're in the US military and coming out if you're in a theocracy, it's one of the ways of the book is structured for people who are familiar with the book at this point is I have some basic guidelines on coming out that apply to most people, but then I break it down. Here's how you come out to family or you come out to friends or you come at work.

Here's how you come out. If you're a student, if you're a parent, if you're in some other specialized situation, here's how you come out. If you live in a conservative community, in a progressive community, if you're a clergy member and I have chapters on coming out, if you're in the US military and if you're living in a theocracy and those are really different situations, you know what I would say to people who are in the US military is, you know, definitely get your ducks in a row first.

There is a lot of anti atheist hostility in the US military, although it seems to vary from unit to unit. But there is this very entrenched evangelical Christian culture that's been developing in the US military over the last several years after last couple of decades, I think. And coming out there is a lot of anti atheist bias and it's very entrenched in the command structure often. But, you know, the US military, you also have a lot of legal protection.

You have the legal right to be an atheist in the US military. You have legal. Come out as an atheist, atheist on your dog tags and so on, you have the legal right to not have prayer forced on. You know, that's often a fight to get those legal rights. But unless you're in a unit where you're really terrified that somebody is going to shoot you if you come out as an atheist. And I think that's extremely rare.

I haven't heard any stories from from people in the US military who said I was really frightened for my life, although I think it's certainly possible. Hey, you're coming up to people with guns, but it is certainly more challenging in the US military. But most military atheists who have come out said that it was the right decision. That's a very different situation in a theocracy. And the writing the chapter on theocracies was one of the hardest to write because they basically had to say, you have to be really, really careful because, yes, your life is on the line here.

Your freedom is on the line here. The life and freedom of your family is on the line here. But it's also the case that people in theocracies do sometimes come out even in a small, limited way, just to their own family and trusted friends. And they can do organizing online if they're careful about it. The main thing that and when I wrote I did this throughout the book, if I was writing a chapter about people whose experience was really different from my own people who are in the US military, people who are in conservative communities, people who are parents, people with children, I ran the chapter by people who had that experience to say, is there anything I'm really missing here?

And that extra with a chapter on theocracies because I knew I don't really I can read about this experience, but I don't really emotionally, psychologically grasp it. And I wanted to make really sure that people who did have that experience looked at the chapter, make sure I wasn't getting anything wrong, corrected mistakes I was making. And one of the things that people said was, you really can do organizing. If you're in a theocracy, you just have to be you can do it online especially.

You just have to be really, really careful about it. And you have to have an exit strategy. You have to have an escape plan. One of the themes that runs throughout the book is when you're getting ready to come out, make sure your ducks in a row make sure that if you were afraid that it might endanger your job, get your resume in order and have a couple of months salary in savings. If you can do that, you know, if you're getting ready to come out and you think it might alienate your community, put down roots in an atheist community first before you come out, just sort of prepare yourself a safe place to land when you come out.

If you're living in a theocracy, preparing a safe place to land means having your passport ready and literally landing in somewhere else, landing somewhere else.

Have friends and allies and colleagues in other countries have skills that you can transfer to other countries if you have to leave, be ready to go on a moment's notice. If they if you think that they're going to come beating down your door. So, you know, it is possible, but it's and of course, coming out is the way that people in theocracies are going to be able to push back against that when organizing is the only way they can push back against them.

But, of course, the reality is that it is much harder and much more dangerous. And I don't encourage anybody to come out if they really think it's going to risk their their safety or their freedom or their life.

So there's a there's been a debate that's probably many or maybe most of our listeners have been at least aware of for the last couple of years in the atheist humanist skeptic communities about the how and how much to include social justice as part of the atheist agenda or just discussion agenda. And you've made the case that talking about social justice and dealing with social justice issues is not actually mission drift or it's a good case of mission drift. You've made that case very eloquently in speeches on your blog and also in your book.

So what would be sort of your your summary of that case?

OK, so, yes, I do think that it is hugely important that atheism, humanism, skepticism, etc. start paying attention to social justice issues, both in terms of what issues we address in the outside world, what projects and so on we take on and also just internally try to keep track of our keep our own house clean. And I don't think it's mission drift. I think it's very central to our mission. And I think there's a couple of reasons for this.

The main reason is that if we don't do that, we're not going to grow. If we don't do that, we are not going to be welcoming to African-Americans, Hispanics, women trained.

Transgender people, working class and blue collar people, you know, other marginalized people, if we don't try to make or make a conscious effort to make ourselves more welcoming to these people, we're going to stay a predominantly white, predominantly male, predominantly college educated, predominantly middle class, predominantly heterosexual CIS gender movement. And there's a couple of reasons for this. One is we all have unconscious biases. We all have unconscious, internalized racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ableism and so on.

And if we don't make a conscious effort to deal with that, we're going to perpetuate it. We're going to perpetuate it without intending to. It doesn't make us bad people. It just means we've internalized the messages from our culture. But if we don't make a conscious effort to learn about those biases and try to overcome them and compensate for them, we're going to perpetuate them. A perfect example of this is a very classic example is who we get as speakers at events and conferences for years.

When you looked at atheist and skeptical conference speaker roster's, it was overwhelmingly men and white people. It was overwhelmingly white men. Once conference organizers started making a conscious effort to diversify and saying, let's not do this. Let's try to get some more women, some more people of color, some more blue collar working class people, some more young people and so on. UNTA speaker roster's hey, lo and behold, there was this huge talent pool that was being untapped.

There was a huge pool of really extraordinary writers and speakers, activists, researchers, historians and so on that just weren't on organizers radar. And that's not that they were bad people. It's that we have a an unfortunate but natural tendency to trust and to turn to people who we see as being more like us. And so so we have to make a conscious effort to overcome that. And then when it comes to the issues that we're actually working on, the the actual you know, what what missions do we focus our organize the organizations attention on?

Um, I don't nobody's really asking organized atheism to start working on issues that are completely off track from theism. But there's a lot of areas where atheism and skepticism overlap with other with other social change movements. You know, a reproductive rights is a perfect example. It's like reproductive rights is a huge area where the religious right has gotten to control law and public policy in really harmful, toxic, horrible ways. And because of religion, religion has gotten to control the agenda about reproductive rights, about birth control and abortion in the United States.

That's an issue that organized atheists could absolutely take on. It would not be mission drift, and it would be something that I think would get a lot more women going, hey, this is my movement. This movement is about me. This movement cares about me. This movement cares about issues that really matter to me on a day to day level. So when we expand our vision to include missions that are still central to the missions of combating religion, working on church state separation, working to advance rationality and skeptical and critical thinking and so on, we can apply that to areas that we haven't traditionally applied it to.

But there are still very much within that wheelhouse and that make us more interesting and more attractive to a wider variety of people that we've traditionally appealed to.

OK, but so let me push a little bit on that one, because there is there's two objections against that one could come up with with the general scenario you just described. On the one hand, there is sort of the genetic essentially what you refer to as the mission drift objection. I mean, yes, there are certainly certain areas of social justice that are obviously even within the purview of 80s, such as diversity at conferences. I would I would I would think that's a no brainer.

But there are others that are not. I mean, after all, it's not really a philosophy of anything. It's just it's just a statement. It's an epistemic statement about a particular issue. Starting with the supernatural, it doesn't imply any particular positive philosophy of especially social justice, and as you know, there is more in fact, a split there because there is a significant number of these to actually libertarians and who vehemently disagree with some of the social issues that the more sort of liberal progressive side of the movement comes up with.

And, of course, let's not forget that there are, in fact, some conservatives who are also atheist and they have their own take on social issues.

So. So one objection could be along those lines. Well, it really doesn't imply any or most of what of this, even though you and I would probably agree on most of these topics. But it doesn't it doesn't apply to them. So why in what sense is that not a mission drift, so to speak, as opposed to say again? So diversity, broadly speaking, within the movement or obviously things like church, state separation, that sort of stuff.

The second objection, so.

Well, no, they haven't. They're very related, they're very related. So the second the second objection is essentially another way of saying the same thing, which is historically it's not the case that secular people have not address these issues that have addressed them under the general rubric of secular humanism. I mean, if you talk to secular humanist and to secure humanist societies such as essentially ethical culture, certainly the center is the center for inquiry, I suppose, is one of those and so on that will tell you, well, that's exactly what we're doing.

We've been doing social justice issues for a long time. This is this is really not but but in that sense, from their perspective, it makes much more sense because those organizations actually, Amberleigh, embrace, embrace a particular philosophy which is built around those kinds of social issues, social justice. So, OK, what's what's your take on that?

OK, well, a couple first of all, let's take the first one first. If you're going to be if you're going to take that argument to its logical extreme, you know that atheism really is literally just about this conclusion that there are no gods. It doesn't have any other implications by that argument. Even building atheist community is mission drift. Even working on church state separation is mission drift, because what is the church state separation that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with not believing in God?

You could be an atheist and still think, well, religion has a place in government and you could, as many people are, be religious and still believe in a secular government, a secular society. So by that argument, you know, if you're going to say, well, the only you know, it's like literally we shouldn't work on anything that doesn't have to do with atheism. All we're ever going to what do we even have to work on?

What even do we have to organize around? Even there's a lot of atheists you can say, well, we could work on persuading people out of religion, but there's a lot of atheists who think that that's not a reasonable goal, who think that they personally don't believe in God, but they don't agree with the goal of trying to persuade other people out of religion. So this is just kind of this essential nature of any kind of organizing, any kind of community organizing, any kind of political organizing.

You are never going to get 100 percent agreement from everybody who fits under that identity on every issue you work on. And a good analogy here is the LGBT movement. The LGBT movement is, generally speaking, a fairly progressive movement. And they they we I should say, because I'm bisexual, you know, we've come together on some kind of consensus on what issues will we be working on. And that includes a certain amount of alliance building social things like working on diversity, trying to make themselves make ourselves more open, more welcoming to a wider variety of people and so on.

And generally speaking, it's been a fairly progressive movement and works on progressive political issues. There are a handful of LGBT people who are conservative, who are Republican. There's the Log Cabin Republicans is a whole little organization of them, the Log Cabin Republicans.

If we said, well, we can't work on any issue unless every single LGBT person agrees on that issue, we would be paralyzed. We would never be able to work on anything. Even same sex marriage is a lot of people in the LGBT movement who don't think that should be our priority. And in fact, we don't even believe in marriage at all. If we said, well, we can't work on that because we don't have one hundred percent agreement on it, we would be paralyzed.

We would never get anywhere at this point, which so there's a point at which we have to say we can't work on every single. We can't be all things to all people. We have to be willing to say, is it more important to us to be welcoming to women, to African-Americans, to Hispanics, to Asian-Americans, to working class people, to blue collar people, to disabled people, to LGBT people? Or is it more important for us to be appealing to libertarians?

Well, that's that's an interesting question. But I don't think my my phrasing of the issue was in terms of getting 100 percent agreement. That's really not what I'm concerned about. What I'm confect your example about the LGBT community actually fits pretty well with what I was saying because it raises the same exact issue. The question is what? The question I was asking was what is logically entailed by the fact that somebody is an atheist or which equivalent there would be?

What is what is logically entailed by the fact that somebody is the LGBT person? So it seems that certain things are even and even though you might have, let's say, an atheist who doesn't want to be. Coming out and talking about religion in public, still an atheist by definition of being an atheist would think that religion is not particularly worth sort of a dime, epistemically speaking. Whether you get involved in the movement or not, it's a different question.

But clearly, that is that is the sort of thing that follows from being an atheist. On the other hand, it really does involve being from being an atheist that you have a certain sort of progressive take on political issues. So it isn't a question of agreement. It's a question of how do we get from atheist progressive liberalism or to put it another, to put the essentially the same objection and different in different terms. There's a lot of skeptics who actually push back, as you know, on these kinds of things.

I mean, I happen to be a skeptic who's also an atheist, who is also a progressive liberal. But there are a number of skeptics who actually vehemently oppose the association with it is because that's not what they think.

They don't think that that skepticism entails any sort of overt criticism of religion or a negative reaction religion. So it's more complicated than just not having hundred percent of the people agreeing.

So sorry, I don't want to cut you off, but I I'd really like to hear Greta's take on my concern about about the social justice agenda, about including social justice as part of activism or skepticism, which is that so I find social justice debates fascinating. I actually love like in private. I love having discussions about gender and sexuality and race and and all those subjects. But I don't really talk about them online. I stop talking about them on Facebook because it has it has seemed to me that the there is so much variation between between otherwise very reasonable people.

I'm sorry. Like in the group of like generally reasonable people, there's a ton of variation between whether they consider a given statement a reasonable, like empirical or logical argument versus whether they consider it a hate speech, I don't know, for lack of a better term. And so something that like to one person seems like, well, this is like a totally legitimate question. What does the data say? Or this is a totally legitimate question. Does X logically until Y to someone else?

It's the equivalent of saying, well, but how do we know that blacks aren't really inferior as people? And so so these discussions, like people who in other domains would never speak this way, I have seen again and again like cursing each other out or saying, you know, if you even ask that question, I can't even talk to you. And so for me, in an ideal world, we would totally have those discussions. And I think they're important and fascinating, more so actually, than a lot of the discussions about scientific issues, because it's sort of like less obvious to me what the right way is to to even think about it.

But I sort of feel like the best we can do, at least at this point in history, is to have profitable discussions about about non social justice issues. And like we should take that and be happy that we can have those, at least because when we've tried to have the former, we've failed so, so miserably.

Well, a couple of I want to respond to you and then I also want to respond to the to the other question. My response to Julia is if we say, well, this is a hot button topic, this is something that people very heated. This is something that gets very people very upset. Therefore, we shouldn't discuss it. We can't discuss religion either. You know, it's like I've seen the same kind of really fevered, really emotional discussions happen between atheists and believers, as I have seen between atheists and skeptics about social justice issues.

The only way we're going to move forward and get progress on these issues is to discuss them. And yes, sometimes they're difficult and yes, sometimes they're upsetting. If we don't have them, if we basically we're just essentially my thought is that purely from a strategic standpoint, if we don't work on these issues, we are going to stay a largely white male, middle class, college educated CIS gender movement and we're going to go nowhere. If we don't take this on, we are not going to appeal to a huge number of atheists, nonbelievers, skeptics and so on, and people who are potential atheists and skeptics who are just looking at this movement and going, this is a bunch of middle class white guys talking about 20 more reasons why God doesn't exist.

Why do I care? They don't care about the issues that I care about. They don't care about the ways that religion harms my life. They only care about the ways that religion harms their life. Why should I take this on? A lot of why I am so passionate about this issue is really just pure from a strategic standpoint. We need to expand, we need to grow. We need to make ourselves more appealing to a wider variety of people.

And the if we're not willing to have the difficult conversations now about sexism, about misogyny, about racism within our own community as well as outside of it, if we're not willing to have the difficult conversations about what kinds of can you ask the question, are women in intellectually inferior to men in a way that's not totally freaking sexist? Can you ask that question in a way that's like, oh, I'm just looking at the data objectively? You know, I think it's worth saying, you know, if you're asking that question, you need to look at what assumptions you're making, gender that are even behind that question.

So I think just give up on the question because it's hard. I don't think we can give up on questions just because they're hard.

So just to let you know, we are just about out of time, actually a few minutes over. But did you want to briefly respond to Massimo's earlier point that he made before I jumped in? Sure.

Well, I guess that I would say that we have a lot of disagreements about what are the logical conclusions, for instance, either, again, to draw the analogy, what are the logical conclusions of atheism and what are the logical conclusions, for instance, of being LGBT? You could make the case that being gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans doesn't have any implications outside the fact that you are sexually attracted to people of the same gender or that your gender identity, it does not matter the gender you were assigned at birth.

And what does it have to do with anything else? What does that have to do with marriage? What does it have to do with employment equality? Also, very similarly, the LGBT movement has done alliance work with other other social change movements, such as reproductive rights. Now you could say, what on earth does the LGBT movement have to do with reproductive rights? You'd think if there was any non overlapping two issues, that would be it. But there are, in fact, a lot of similarities there, a lot of parallels.

And purely as a strategic matter, it has been very powerful for the LGBT community to work with the people who are working on reproductive rights and say, hey, you know what? There are a lot of things that are in common here. There's a lot of issues of, you know, the right to bodily autonomy. There's a lot of issues having to do with who are our opponents. It's mostly the religious right. So purely as a matter of strategy, if we don't expand our horizons, we're going to be completely unable to do alliance work with other social change movements.

And that's going to really hamper our ability to do this work. And as far as what what does that really mean? I mean, we can have all those arguments, but the reality is that definitions change and and especially when you're talking about a community or a movement, definitions changes a lot of people for whom back when my parents were nonbelievers, they used to say that atheism didn't just mean not belief in God. That atheist met one hundred percent certainty that there was no God.

They all call themselves agnostic to the definition of that word. To say that that atheist means a reasonable certainty that there is no God.

I think that that fact I mean, I still hear that that definition quite a lot. So there's there's definitely a lot of variation even today about what people understand the word to mean.

What exactly. And I also think that especially when you're talking about just a de facto community organizational viewpoint, there is overlap between people who call themselves atheists and people who call themselves secular humanist and organizations that call themselves atheist or secular or humanist. You know, just speaking for myself. For me, atheism doesn't just mean the conclusion that there are no gods. There's a whole set of implications that the implications of this life is the only life I have. And therefore I need to make it as meaningful and joyful as possible, not just for myself, but for other people of the idea that religion is a toxic influence on the world and that we should push back on it in a number of ways, including ways that religion harms women, including ways that religion harms LGBT people, including the ways that religion specifically harms African and African-American communities and Hispanic communities.

You know that technically, I suppose that's not that doesn't have anything to do with atheism. But for me, it's a natural implication from that conclusion. And, you know, you could say, oh, well, technically, that's secular humanism. That's what atheism. But honestly, the firms are overlapping and. They're not very clearly defined, and I don't want us to not do work that we really need to do if we're going to survive just because we're quibbling about.

No, of course.

But I don't want to know. We need to wrap it up. And Julia's pushing me on that. But, you know, no, it's not a question of, well, the question definitions there for certain people shouldn't be doing the work. I mean, we can all do the whatever work we feel that our conscience dictates that we do. But I don't agree that the definitions are that arbitrary. Yes, people do change concepts about certain things. But, you know, the second humanist tradition has been well established historically.

It's not something it's not just a question. You look are you looking up in the dictionary what ecumenism means? There is a long history, more than a century old history of doing exactly what you're what you're saying, which I think it's important to do. And on the other hand, there is a significant resistance within both the skeptic and the atheist community to move in the direction of secular humanism, essentially. And I think, as I said, for good conceptual reasons, not just not just questions of of definitions, which, of course, are by definition, I suppose they're arbitrary, but that's that's a much longer conversation.

And I think that Julia is getting really impatient and you can't see me now because you're across the country. But I'm shooting eyes at you right now. OK, completely failed in my my role as timekeeper. So I will I will reluctantly wrap up the section of the podcast and we will now move on to the, roughly speaking, PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julia and I pick a suggestion for our listeners to stick with our rational fancy. This time we ask our guest, Greta Christina, for her suggestions.

Greta, so the book that I am most excited about right now, that's in the Atheist Skepticism Secular Humanism Wheelhouse is a book called The Ebony Exodus Project Why some Black Women Are Walking Out on Religion and Others Should Do. It's authored by Candace R.M. Gorham. And I picked up this book kind of on a book and I started reading it and I didn't stop reading it until I was done. I stayed up till like 4:00 in the morning finishing this book.

I didn't do anything else. I blew off deadlines until I finish this book. And there's a couple of reasons why I was really excited about this book. One is it's just a really good read. Candace Gorham is a really good writer. The book is very engaging. The book is just it's beautifully written. It's that kind of blend of smart academic intellectual writing. But that's very clear and very down to earth and very accessible and and just fascinating and engaging.

So I loved it on that basis. And I also loved it because it's looking at an area that we kind of are looking at very much. Her book is very much about the experience of African-American women in the church and outside of the church, African-American women who have left the churches. And one of the reasons why I really loved it is we have a lot of mythology. We have a lot of mythology about religion generally, but in particular, we have a lot of mythology about African-American women and religion.

And we have this idea that that it's a lost cause when it comes to atheists, that African and when there's some research showing that African-American women are the most religious demographic in the United States and that they're the most religiously fervent demographic in the United States. But the picture that I got from this book picture where. Yes, that's true. But boy, is that some fertile ground for nonbelievers because there's a lot of African-American women who are very dissatisfied with religion.

There's a lot of real problems in the churches in ways that that's really doing tremendous harm to African-American women. There's there's this common trope that, oh, people need religion for community. And that's especially true for community, for support, for support structures and so on. And and that's especially true in marginalized communities such as African-American communities. And I read this book and a lot of my reaction was what support system? This isn't a support system. This is a toxic cesspool.

This is ruining people's lives. And a lot of African-American women are waking up to that. And it is not that there's not also it is complicated also that there's support and meaning and value along with the toxic cesspool that religion provides. But I was just this really it really just kind of did this huge shift in how I saw this world. And, um, and so it's a very fascinating read. Probably my if there's one atheist book that came out in 2013 that would suggest you had to read, I would say this should be very high on your list.

Great. Well, we will we will put up a link to that book as well as to coming out atheists on on our website, the rationally speaking podcast Dog. And we are unfortunately all out of time. But it was such a pleasure having you on the show. I'm so glad we finally did this.

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, it was a pleasure.

Thanks for coming. So this concludes another episode of Rationally Speaking. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense. The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benny Pollack and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York. Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission.

Thank you for listening.