Tweet Your Brains Interview Special: Ben Atheism

Public Intellectual Ben 'Ban' Atheism agreed to do an interview with Spool Pidgin. However, true to his belief in discourse being held within the agora of the public eye, Ben stipulated the interview had to take place on his beloved Twitter where he's well-regarded. True to his reputation, Ben began the interview in his signature forthright style...

Thanks, Dave. And thanks, Ben!


@BanAtheism Facts!!!

* @BanAtheism claims he's never grasped the concept of gas. "I don't get what people are fussing about:  there's liquid, there's solid. End of story. I'm not impressed with all these stories one hears..."

* Watch out for a young @BanAtheism's walk-on part in BBC sitcom series 'The Good Life'! It's in episode four of series one ("Blink and you'll miss me!" he tells Spool Pidgin). He's the London Council planning permission operative who calls Tom a 'Shit-sucking C*nt-mind'.

*@BanAtheism fell in love with a Star-ship Trooper.

*Facebook removed @BanAtheism's page due to disrespectful clothing:  a snorkel and a sarong!  "How can it be sarong when it feels s'rite? I asked them," @BanAtheism quips.  "They didn't get the joke..."

*Vital statistics:  Born 1961. Married to Belshazzar Shropshire (Actress, dachshund). No known bladder.  

Asherah

 

 

 

Ever wondered 'If the God of the bible had a wife what would she look like?' No? Well, anyway, here she is- Asherah. Back in the Hebrew day, Yahweh was but one of a pantheon of gods including El, Baal and his missus here. 

Then, in a moment that would define the future, some time after the Babylonian exile, the priests decreed Yahweh the one and only deity and Asherah got her divorce papers (A garbled reference survives in the bible about cutting down 'sacred tree poles', Asherah meaning 'sacred tree').
 

Two questions immediately arise. i)- what would the cultures, faith and art of Europe and Asia look like now, had Yahweh and Asherah remained an item and ii): How much would Hello magazine have paid for an exclusive photo spread at their new kitchen?

Of Richard Dawkins And His Godawful Tweeting

Put that i-Phone down, Richard!

It's fair to say Richard Dawkins's adventures in Twitter-land have been, for the main, pretty disastrous. He's always been a remarkably clear thinker--anyone reading his books can tell that--but not a compact one. Here's his latest lamentable qwerty-dive:

"Mehdi Hasan admits to believing Muhamed [sic] flew to heaven on a winged horse. And New Statesman sees fit to print him as a serious journalist."

 Yeah. Not his most nuanced work, let's face it. To me it's more like some hastily scribbled thespian snark in Kenneth Williams' diary ("Hancock doing his stuff in too slow a tempo. He and Sid James' conversation real pleb stuff. Don't care for them at all") than one of the world's foremost explainers.

Self-destructive? Not 'alf! Online atheism, after all, is surrounded by hordes who'll willfully misread its every utterance, as the columns of the UK's press--both self-pleasuring right and de-clawed left--well attest. 'Dawkins Screams All Muslim Journos Should Be Sacked' swiftly became the Web's Tabla Rasa.

 Andrew Brown inevitably stuck his conk in, while this time around even faux-eccentric MP Tom Watson gleaned another self-aggrandizing freebie with 'You're a gratuitously unpleasant man'. He'd never felt safe enough to say that to Murdoch, even.

The sad part, at least to me, was that the tweet forever tarnished one of Dawkins's best moments. In a debate for Al Jazeera, he asks Mehdi Hassan (whose journalism I generally admire, I hasten to add) if he believes Muhammad flew up to heaven on a Horse. Hassan replies yes. Not as a metaphor--rich as the tale of Buraq is with that--but literally.

Watch this clip. Watch it and forget whatever preconceptions about RD you may have. There's no red-faced secular-nazi-pope Strawkins here; just calm, reasoned inquiry into the privileged indolence of religious literalism. 'Why up?' is a bloody good question. 'Yes, let's' is very funny. Hassan knows he's being enfiladed here because he's an intelligent guy, but that same intelligence is reduced to spinning about in a tight shell of religious upbringing. It's as plain as day.

Dawkins has posted an apology for the crudity of his tweet up on his site, explaining what he meant to say. It's an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff however, for the media won't have the nuance or objectivity to print or link to it. It's doesn't fit the narrative. I just hope Dawkins learns to use Twitter as a means to link to longer pieces because, as things stand, theists and faitheists--like Christ with his loaves--can stretch 140 characters into a heckuva feast.

Speaking as a non-believer it's his irresponsibility that depresses me most. He should know by now that a million arsewits lie in the cyber-heather, ready to pounce at his slightest gob-wrong. They intend to make him an irrelevancy.

It's funny. People talk about the pigheadedness of atheism but no one speaks of how atheism's critics subconsciously will it to be pigheaded. The mere act of being an atheist puts peoples' noses out of joint. They've loved ones who've passed away and it's understandable they want those loved ones' to still exist somewhere, somewhere where they will meet again. But daily, with each new scientific insight (the scale of the universe compared to us, the increasingly explicable chemical emergence of DNA etc), that very human need is increasingly weighed upon. Few, if any, like to be reminded.

Laugh if you like, but I'm one of that silent chunk of non-believers who wish people would just accept them as openly atheist and leave it at that (OK, so I rant about religions extremes but so do many theists). But in social situations it never works out like that. It's assumed I am angry.

Once I'm 'outed' someone will get irritable and pick and prod. Eventually, dammit, I bite: I like a debate as much as the next pub boor. Things heat up and almost always it becomes an unpleasant experience. My opponents mouths will be sneering and laughing, but their eyes...

...their eyes dammit, have this pleading look (You'll see it in Mehdi Hassan's in the above vid. The body language is archetypal too). An atheist among believers becomes a sort of totemic death's head, a raven mocked by jays. It's no longer a debate, because you've become the death of a parent, a dear friend or, ultimately, themselves. Seeing this, my mouth keeps up the bravado but my heart loses resolve. My heart--sap that it is--wants only to reassure my friends, tell them I'm sorry and that everything will be fine.

As below so above. The media plays upon these fears, fear equaling click-bait, and a minor industry has emerged of columnists who'll soothe the reader's brow by dismissing atheism with intelligent-sounding sentences. 'What these atheists don't understand about faith...', 'It's a sort of religion, with Dawkins its fundamentalist pope...' etc. You know the drill.

In such an atmosphere, whether your non-belief is strident or conciliatory, you have to accept there's something like a -20% modifier to any statement you make being understood, let alone accepted. On Twitter it is something more like 40% (If this blog's anything to go by men are particularly susceptible to its inherent traps, with anger, privilege and--in my own case--swagger being clumsy y-chromosome hooves.).

Any self-aware atheist--which I once took Richard Dawkins to be--would do well to remain wary of that. Every utterance should be checked over for clarity, for leaks of comprehension. In fact it's a responsibility. The other side never have to, of course, so it's not a fair fight. But it never has been.     

It's Clear These 'New Atheists' Are Biased Toward... Er...

This post-Christian puritanism, largely oblivious now of its history, is highly visible in the New Atheism of the 1990s and 2000s, (with a) strange indifference--except at the margins--to all religions except Christianity. 

-Francis Spufford, Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense


A bizarre and wholly irrational fixation on Islam, as opposed to the evils done by other religions, has been masquerading in the dark under the banner of rational atheism for way too long. 

-Glenn Greenwald, columnist 

Bryan Appleyard: The Adequacy Delusion

I've got a problem. It's been bothering me some weeks now.Perhaps you can help me. It's all to do with an encounter with journalist Bryan Appleyard on Twitter.

The God Bores/

See, Bryan wrote this article on New Statesman's website. The article- 'The God Wars'- was of that popular and comment-generating kind, basically: 'Dawkins and his cultish acolytes of the millitant secularist apocalypse just don't get it, do they? They're actually a religion! See what I did there?' Y'know the tune: a scared and slavish mentality convinced of its own scandalous irreverance, like a sheep in chocolate lingerie.

Amongst this crowd, Appleyard's piece stands out for being entirely cannibalistic. Or perhaps tinned spam might be a better comparison- it takes the spiciest chunks of all similar articles preceeding it, compresses them, and yet somehow conspires to be quite flavourless. Like every 'Secular apocalypse' article it lurched into unconcious self-parody (the best kind!), with such, erm, imposing prose as-

'The third leg of Neo-atheism is Darwinism, the AK-47 of Neo-atheist shock troops.'

It shouldn't have to be stressed that using the term 'Darwinism' instead of 'evolution' earns you 10 dumbass points on your fucknut club card.

A brief aside.../

To be fair to Appleyard, he did manage to gather a swathe of New Atheism's 'victims' for a conflab in some media-land bistro or other. Picture all the people you've ever dumped discussing you around a table and you've an idea of the general tenor of this derriere-a-derriere. This consortium of the maltreated contained trustfund philosopher Alain De Botton, who, along with profound observations like-

'(explaining religion scientifically) is as bizarre as launching a scientific investigation into the truth of Anna Karenina' (We call them literature essays, Alain)

he also 'finds Dawkins a psychologically troubling figure.'

Classy. Alain De Botton, you'll recall, informed one New York Times reviewer-

'I will hate you to the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.'

Truly, De Botton is the Seneca of our age. In the sense that he's a hypocrite who doesn't practice the values he hopes to inspire in others. And a tit.

Alright, Jim, the opener of this blog was a tactically obvious reader-hook but then you blew it on typical webtheist snark. Get to the twatting point already.../


PZ Myers took Appleyard's arse to town on Twitter, as is Myer's want. A fellow New Statesman journo, Helen Lewis, told Appleyard that he must have really irked Myers with that bit in the article about his 'limited' prose style. Appleyard replied along the lines of 'a light touch' being the best revenge.

Right: no more Mr Lurker! Time to hit these smug bastards, methinks (and Bryan Appleyard is the kind of person who'd bloody use the word 'methinks')! I decided to throw a 140 character beer glass into this eccumenical bar brawl-

@pzmyers may be hitting below the belt, Bry, but it's hard not to when hisopponents shorts cover their face.@BryanAppleyard @helenlewis
— James Worrad (@jimworrad) March 2, 2012

Taste my metaphor, Bryan! I thought that'd be the last of it, given Appo had enough on his twitter-plate, but no! Imagine my surprise when he replied-

@jimworrad @pzmyers @helenlewis Sounds clever but don't understand.
— Bryan Appleyard (@BryanAppleyard) March 2, 2012

To which I fired back-

@BryanAppleyard @pzmyers @helenlewisQ.E-to-the-muthaluvin'-D.
— James Worrad (@jimworrad) March 2, 2012

He didn't reply.


Hmm.../

For a while, it was like I'd drained him of smug. I was a self-regard vampire, if you will. But it didn't last.
Doubt sank in. How could he not understand? Was it because I'd forgot to put a space between the words 'his' and 'opponents' and he'd thought I'd meant hippopotamus? Or maybe the analogy was shoddy or plain wrong. I worry about this sort of thing in my daily life. I say things and friends and colleagues smile but their eyes are texting 'WTF'? Am I on some other wavelength to most- dickhead FM, say?

But HOW? Surely what I said is comprehensible, given a second's thought? Let's run through this- I say PZ Myers is hitting below the belt, 'below the belt' is a boxing reference, Bryan Appleyard- as Myer's 'boxing opponent'- has his shorts over his face= Bryan Appleyard's reasoning blinds him and his arguments are rubbish. Where's the weak link here? Where's the pothole?

Wait a minute... maybe his reply was a witty put down that I'm too dumb to get! Maybe he and Alain De Botton et al are sat in that same restaurant as I write this, chuckling over their brioche and latte. Maybe Baroness Warsi and Rev Giles Frasier are there too; under the table and noshing him off. Oh God... (As Dawkins might say upon walking in on this)

Appleyard went to Cambridge, for pity's sake! He's written for the Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. I'd be lucky to write for Mayfair. He's a titan. I'm a midget with bad knees and gout. He simply HAS to be whipping my ass in front of everyone on Twitter who cares to gawp. Surely?

Unless... unless Britain's establishment commentariat are nought but a bunch of well-connected oldboys who's minds conspire, somehow, to be utterly empty yet full of shit.

But that's impossible, isn't it? What do you reckon?