{"id":3764,"date":"2016-02-14T23:45:58","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T05:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3764"},"modified":"2016-02-15T09:06:48","modified_gmt":"2016-02-15T15:06:48","slug":"getting-involved-in-controversy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2016\/02\/14\/getting-involved-in-controversy\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Getting Involved in Controversy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"An update on Richard&#039;s condition in his own words by RDFRS\" width=\"500\" height=\"400\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?visual=true&#038;url=https%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F246865010&#038;show_artwork=true&#038;maxheight=750&#038;maxwidth=500\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;[N]ot getting involved in controversy is one of those things I&#8217;m not particularly talented at.&#8221; \u2014 Richard Dawkins, ~5:15<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The world needs your irascibility, sir.&#8221; &#8211; Caleb Lack<\/p>\n<p>Controversy will always be with us, so long as we\u00a0remain the emotionally-driven fallible apes who first\u00a0emerged from Africa\u00a0some few thousand\u00a0generations ago. To avoid controversy altogether would require an intolerable amount of apathy on the salient issues of the day, for example, there will\u00a0inevitably be controversy and strife around President Obama&#8217;s pick to succeed Justice Scalia. To ignore\u00a0this controversy is to sit out a public policy debate that will determine the future of constitutional law and civil rights in America.<\/p>\n<p>It is not difficult to think of similarly unavoidable\u00a0controversies, policy debates which are both ineluctable\u00a0and indispensable, in which humanists and secularists must\u00a0take sides: the ongoing fight for LGBT equality, the endless legal wrangling over an array of reproductive health services, the neverending struggle to keep church and state separate, among a host of related examples. Wherever theocracy rears it head and demands a return to the Bronze Age, we must not cultivate a talent for not getting involved in controversy.<\/p>\n<p>Then there is the delicate question of whether it is acceptable to wade into avoidable (as opposed to policy-related) controversies,\u00a0such as whether any gods exist. It is probably no coincidence that the individuals\u00a0who have risen\u00a0to high\u00a0prominence in the field of atheism are those\u00a0who proved more than willing to brazenly and openly call bullshit on theistic memes. People like these:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"imgur-embed-pub\" lang=\"en\" data-id=\"92XviAC\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/imgur.com\/92XviAC\">Atheism &#8211; They&#8217;re right. You&#8217;re wrong.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/s.imgur.com\/min\/embed.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>With the\u00a0arguable\u00a0exception of\u00a0Neil Degrasse Tyson, everyone on that list\u00a0has deliberately courted controversy. Yes, even the kindly and venerable\u00a0Daniel Dennett\u00a0has been known to <a href=\"http:\/\/commonsenseatheism.com\/?p=281\" target=\"_blank\">take a stand<\/a> for highly unpopular ideas. It is in\u00a0the nature of both the atheist and skeptic movements to attract and exalt\u00a0contrarians, because our primary social\u00a0function is to call popular, potentially harmful, deeply held ideas into question. Ideas like theism, original sin, faith-healing, and anti-vaccination nonsense. (Sorry, <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/insolence\/2015\/02\/09\/after-five-years-bill-maher-lets-his-antivaccine-freak-flag-fly-again\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bill Maher<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<p>Given that we have a collection of controversy-courting contrarians\u00a0at the forefront of movement atheism, can we reasonably expect that they will stay on script,\u00a0using their talent for controversy strictly\u00a0in the ways that we happen to like? There are those who demand that it must be so, and expect conference organizers to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.butterfliesandwheels.org\/2016\/whats-that-oh-its-the-underside-of-the-bus\/\" target=\"_blank\">fall<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/skepchick.org\/2016\/02\/necss-thinks-richard-dawkins-is-alright-after-all\/\" target=\"_blank\">in<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/freethoughtblogs.com\/entequilaesverdad\/2016\/02\/15\/dear-necss-you-have-seriously-fucked-up\/\" target=\"_blank\">line<\/a>. And then\u00a0there are those who ask\u00a0only that we work to create &#8220;room for a range of reasonable opinions&#8221; and allow a <a href=\"http:\/\/necss.org\/2016\/02\/14\/statement-from-the-executive-committee\/\" target=\"_blank\">frank and open discussion<\/a>\u00a0thereof.\u00a0\u00a0I cast my\u00a0lot firmly with the latter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;[N]ot getting involved in controversy is one of those things I&#8217;m not particularly talented at.&#8221; \u2014 Richard Dawkins, ~5:15 &#8220;The&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":2297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}