Over the weekend, a full-blown scandal erupted in the skeptical movement atheist and skeptical communities^* over sexism and attitudes about sexual harassment. It started with a fairly straightforward story about a clueless man putting a woman in an uncomfortable situation. The conversation about it was interesting, to say the least. An important point that came up multiple times is that many men do not truly understand what women go through in such situations.

This point was driven home when Richard Dawkins spoke up about it. Through his own words, he proved quite clearly that a lot of men just don’t get it.

Here’s what happened, boiled down from a video post Skepchick Rebecca Watson made about this (she tells this story starting at 4m30s into the video at that link). Rebecca was a speaker at a conference recently. After her talk and a late evening of socializing with attendees at the bar, she got on an elevator to go to her room. She found herself alone on the elevator with a man presumably also an attendee. He said he "found her very interesting", and would she like to get some coffee in his hotel room? Rebecca turned him down, and in her video talks about how uncomfortable that made her feel.

If the story ended here there would be obvious things to say about it (obvious to me, at least, but not everyone, as will become quite clear). This man may have had nothing but noble intentions, but that doesn’t matter. Being alone in an elevator with a man late at night is uncomfortable for any woman, even if the man is silent. But when he hits on her? There’s no way to avoid a predatory vibe here, and that’s unacceptable. A situation like this can lead to sexual assault; I just read in the news here in Boulder that a few days ago a relatively innocent situation turned into assault. This isn’t some rare event; it happens a lot and most women are all-too painfully aware of it.

Rebecca, apparently, handled this situation with aplomb, and I’m glad. She turned it into a useful lesson for men on how not to treat women.

At this point there are many offshoot discussions and tangential topics being discussed on the skeptical blogs and elsewhere. I will ignore those, as they distract from what is in my opinion the most important thing here. As it happens, PZ Myers wrote a blog post about this, and Richard Dawkins — yes, the Richard Dawkins, PZ has confirmed this — left a comment in that post. And what he said… well. Read it for yourself:

It took me a moment to parse this. (more…)

So last week Pope Benedict XVI was in the UK giving speeches. He said several things of note, but one of them stands out among the rest. At Holyroodhouse, he said this:

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny”

Now, I’m the kind of person whose first inclination is to give people the benefit of the doubt. So I read the whole transcript of the Pope’s speech, twice, and after thinking about it, I can’t see any way of interpreting the speech as a whole other than as him saying secularism and atheism = lack of virtue and morality = Nazism.

That is such a grossly flawed chain of reasoning that it strains credulity well past its limit. It’s hard to know where to even begin debunking these statements. Maybe to start with, Hitler wasn’t an atheist (though his personal beliefs were unclear; he used religion or the lack thereof to his advantage when needed, for example using atheism as a bogeyman to rally the people against Russia). More importantly, The Catholic Church went way out of its way to support Hitler during WWII^*. [Update: Apparently, the Church's relationship with Hitler was more complicated than I first read. There was condemnation of Nazis, as well as some support. I think the best thing we can say here is that blanket statements about large organizations can be inaccurate, and need to be done with care. The history of this situation is complex.]

Mind you, I am not trying to condemn the entire Catholic religion, or even the Church (the Church then is not the same as the Church today). I am pointing out that what the Pope said in the UK is pure nonsense, and in fact widely known to be untrue — in fact, studies have shown that secular societies tend to have better moral and social behavior (lower homicide rates, lower infant mortality, lower STD rates, and so on). I would go so far as to say the Pope was being bigoted, equating Nazism and atheism in a way to specifically spur hatred of nonbelievers, or at least amplify mistrust. And given the Church’s support of Nazism at the time, condemning atheists for Nazism is galling.

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Last week I posted a video interview I did with George Hrab at TAM London, but I was able to snag a couple more with other interesting and cool people.

Ariane Sherine qualifies for both. She is a warm, funny, self-effacing woman, yet organized the famous atheist bus campaign in England, as well as edited the book An Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (to which I contributed an essay on the Star of Bethlehem). I talked with her as things were getting cleaned up after the meeting, so there’s some background noise, but I think you can make out what she’s saying in this brief video interview.

I like her point a lot; atheists tend to be reviled in the U.S., but are just as misunderstood as Christians and Jews and Muslims are to each other, and vice-versa and every which way you want to permute those combinations.

I still have one more TAM London interview to post, and that’ll go up Wednesday morning. Stay tuned!

On this day, the anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the United States, it’s common for people to look back at what they were doing at that time, how they were involved, what they were thinking. It’s human nature to look back on big anniversaries, both happy and otherwise, and recollect.

It’s also natural to seek meaning in such acts, try to make sense of them, fit them into our view of how the world works and how it should work. Sometimes the pieces fit. Sometimes they don’t.

Today I saw once again a picture that’s been floating around the web for a few years now. It shows the Twin Towers, and the caption reads, "Science flies people to the Moon. Religion flies people into buildings." It’s an interesting quotation. It’ll guarantee enraging religious folks, while self-satisfying people who are antireligious.

But is it accurate? After all, it was science that created the airplanes, science that built those buildings, science that developed the technology to bring the two together at high velocity. You might then say yes, but religion was the pilot; it was the fundamentalist jihadic brand of Islam that guided those men to do what they did.

And I say, yes. Exactly. In this case, both science and religion were tools, used for nefarious ends.

Defining science can be difficult. It’s a method, a way of looking at things. It’s a compendium of facts, knowledge, data. It’s a tool, used to investigate the world and to make sure we don’t let our biases, egos, and wishes get in the way of finding what’s real. Science (and skepticism) boil off the dross and leave the pure nugget of reality.

Religion, to those who are religious, is similar in that they believe it is a way of making sense of the world. It is of course entirely different than science in its methodology, but it holds no less thrall over the way people see reality. To someone who is very religious, there is no other way to perceive life.

In that sense, religion and science are different because to a scientist science is a tool used to help understand the world, but to the religious religion is the way to see the world.

However, religion can be a tool as well. It was used to brainwash 19 young men, to convince them to do something that countless generations of evolution have almost completely bred out of our systems: commit suicide. With fantasies of an afterlife and admonitions of the greater good, those men flew multiton jets into buildings, and changed our lives forever.

But it’s not hard to imagine things being a little different. Had those men not been subjected to that fringe religion, had they instead grown up in a more open environment, exposed to things like diversity, open-mindedness to other people’s ways of life, and the realization that they may be wrong and that all knowledge is tentative… we might not be spending this day in remembrance.

Still. They were immersed in their beliefs, told what to think, how to think. In this case, religion was a tool for abuse.

It’s not difficult to create a list of both good and bad things both science and religion have brought us. Such lists have been debated and used as bludgeons for years, so I won’t belabor them here. The point is, as tools, science and religion are neither good nor evil. They can be used either way.

Note that I am not saying any particular religion is right, or even that any of them accurately portrays the Universe for what it is — it should be clear by now I don’t think that at all. As a tool to seek truth in the Universe, I don’t think religion works very well. But as a framework for many people, and as tool to inspire them, its motivational abilities are without question. For good or for ill.

I’m not necessarily trying to make any grand point here. All I’m doing is making an aside, if you will, a mumbled comment amidst all the rhetoric that will no doubt fly today about moderate versus fundamentalist religion, about atheism versus religion, about us versus them, and this versus that.

In the hand of a carpenter a hammer can build a house, and in the hand of a madman it can stave in a skull.

Which will you be today?