Ethan-Eaten: On Being a Minority

A cyber-bully has had his way with us for years. Time to kick him in the 'nads.

Minorities can have it pretty tough.

Throughout history they've been taken advantage of and stepped on, mistreated and abused. Even when I was young, casual racial slurs were thrown around the school yard, often right in the faces of the people being mocked. Although most of that was just childhood cruelty, the fact that racism exists at all suggests a general attitude in mankind; that we can consider some people to be of lesser worth than ourselves, simply because there are fewer of them around.

At least historically, that's all it seems to take for a group of people to minimize another. Whichever group has the greatest numbers tends to invent funny names for all the others, even formulate nasty summations of their characters. I say historically, because we like to believe that we've moved past such hatred in the modern age; and that any minority, no matter how small, can expect to be treated with respect.

But I'm not so sure. See, I should know how it feels to be a minority, because as an atheist, I'm one of them.

"Minority? What's that white boy?"

Alright, alright. Skeptics and atheists come from all colours and cultures, so by some definitions of the world, they can't constitute a minority. And I certainly don't wish to trivialize what racial or sexual discrimination must feel like by claiming a piece of that pie. Yet there's no arguing that us secularists constitute an intellectual minority, as we're often reminded of in appeal to common practice arguments against us. "Non-religious people only make up 3% of the population*, so you must be wrong!"

Being part of an intellectual, or philosophical, minority means you cannot be picked out with a casual glance. You can go into any store or public building without being identified for your beliefs**. It's only when us heathens open our mouths that people take notice, which is precisely why many of us don't.

Yet in recent years that's begun to change. While a few vocal non-believers have always been around, places like Twitter have allowed large groups of like-minded people to get together and share their thoughts. Average, everyday Joes have felt liberated enough to publicly proclaim themselves as freethinkers, atheists, skeptics, secularists, or rationalists.

These names sometimes denote different things. Indeed, while I'm technically an atheist because I don't believe that gods exist, I prefer to self identify as a skeptic, because God is (probably) just one myth amongst many. I put down the god-hypothesis, at least to my own satisfaction, when I was perhaps 15 years old; so it's not like that issue is still burning a raging hole in my brain. Mankind has attached itself to plenty of silly ideas, and I'm out to question all of them. Or perhaps more accurately, mankind has only ever had one good idea, that being rationalism, and I'm out to promote it.

But I'm getting sidetracked. The reason I wanted to talk about being a minority is that for the last decade or so ours was the target of some pretty nasty hate speech***, specifically from a Montreal man who's suddenly become very well known. We know his real name, but for the time being the police are simply calling him David M@bus^♠. Rather than summarize the story myself, here's CBC Montreal's coverage.

The police claim to have just recently heard their first official complaint, but I'm fairly certain that that's hogwash. I know at least a few names of people who have complained to the RCMP and their local police, so I can't see how that information could not have filtered back to the SPVM. (Service de police de la Ville de Montréal) If the police had heard these complaints before, then they must have been ignored.

It would be massively speculative and indeed unfair of me to suggest that the Montreal Police ignored these complaints because some of them were coming from atheists. I'm not familiar enough with Quebec law to say what the threshold is for action is such cases, nor can I be certain that any complaints that had come in were looked at with anything more than a sideways glance.

However one thing is certain. If the SPVM, or anyone else for that matter, was tolerating hate speech against atheists simply because they were atheists, it means that society hasn't progressed very far at all.

Not that that would surprise anybody. Secular arguments in the public discourse are perpetually ignored, and every atheist can tell you about encounters with those who feel perfectly comfortable treating you like a piece of shit^♠^♠ for not believing. There's no shortage of ways in which the non-religious are treated unequally, and hateful comments in the blogosphere only scratch at the surface of the problem.

Perhaps people aren't as progressive as they think they are. Maybe folks are just as likely to put down minorities as they always were, the only difference being that now groups can escape persecution with somewhat smaller numbers. If you make up 10% of the population we'll respect you. Any less than that, and we start inventing funny names.

The very idea that belief in any deity buys you protection from hate speech, but belief in none of them does not, seems beyond barbaric to me. I hate to say anything as tiresome as "atheists are people too", but based on my experience, it's worth noting that we're pretty damn awesome people. In the case of the aforementioned cyber bully and his constant harassment, a tech savvy and pissed off minority put together a newsworthy campaign to get this jerk looked into. We can only hope that justice is done as a result.

I guess skeptics and atheists have to learn the lesson that many minorities already have. If you want respect, you have to go take it for yourself.

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*Just pulled that number from my bum, so to speak.

**It's important to note that atheism is not a belief system. It is the lack of one. I've been in many discussions where a religious person will tell me that atheism is also a form of faith, because it requires that you believe that the world just spun together on it's own, out of nothing. That's a common argument, and there are a million ways to refute it, but here's mine.

You don't need a hypothesis for how the world got here in order to reject the religious one. While science has given us strong clues as to how that all happened, there are plenty of pre-science examples of people who rejected belief in gods, without benefit of that knowledge. If your memory was wiped clean and you were deposited in some isolated woodland for the rest of your life, there's no reason to think that you'd conclude a god had put the trees there.

Once can simply remain in the dark about phenomenon, without inventing bogus theories. Any good skeptic claims to remain in the dark, but to lean towards whatever the evidence is saying.

As mentioned, I don't focus on religion, so I thought I'd bundle that argument into this post rather than write a whole new one.

***Although most of it was on Twitter, so should we call it 'Hate tweech'? ... I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

^♠As you can tell, I'm avoiding using his name. I'd prefer the douchenozzle not appear on this page.

^♠^♠Thanks (sorta) to Nadir for this discouraging link.

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