Leaving Dayton Freethought and the reasons why I left

Yesterday, I quit the atheist group Freethought Dayton.  As I often do with this sort of thing, I'm going to recap why.

Alas, none of it will have the . . . vigor of my debacles in Miami!  No guy lying about how he had seventy bachelor's degrees and the government had to "bring him back" because of what was in his head.  No stories of murder-suicide.  It was much more pedestrian than that - plain old-fashioned racism.

I will admit I am quite intolerant of racism.  Fairly normal, acceptable levels of racism leave me sick to my soul.  I think no racism should be acceptable!  Broadly speaking, I live up to this.

In particular, I was at an event and people were tossing out bullshit, racist comments about Muslims (which is the most acceptable form of racism allowed in the US, right now).  One person said that Muslims were only interested in technology if it could be used to kill . . . this infuriated me.  He was talking about people whose homes were invaded who have cobbled together a few bombs . . . fighting the most comprehensive and technologically advanced military that has ever existed.  The US spends about half the world's military budget every year but it's Muslims who are in love with weapons technology!  It was absurd.

Another dude said that Muslims stopped thinking after the year 1500 and all intellectual and moral virtues passed to the West (which they also asserted was somehow different than "the Christian world" . . . it made no sense to me, either).  Again, infuriating.  We think of Muslims as racist . . . but this dude is German.  There are people who are still living who remember being locked in concentration camps.  For Westerns, with our elaborate, multi-century history of genocide, conquest and colonization to believe that we are in some fashion morally superior to Muslims since 1500 is the intellectual position of a . . . well, racist.  Indeed, I find it very hard to assert that we're morally superior now, given how many missiles we fire into whatever country we want and how often we get into wars based on thin lies.

That same guy had mentioned something nasty about Muslims every time I saw him.  He seemed to be looking for the chance to talk shit about them.

When I mentioned that was racism, they asserted "Islam isn't a race!"  Since one of the common definitions of race is a group of people united by culture, language and religion, I beg to differ.  I mean, right then, I said, "It is common to refer to Islamophobia as a form of racism."  I further said that I had no interest in arguing the semantics of bigotry - even if Islamophobia isn't according-to-Hoyle racism (hint: it is, this is particularly true because almost all Muslims aren't white), it's a vicious form of bigotry - which is the problem regardless of the name, that they were telling ignorant lies about a huge, diverse group of people in order to smear them and make it easier to hate them.

They also asserted that Richard Dawkins isn't racist, despite his support for guys like Geert Wilder and his numerous examples of hate speech against Muslims.

Taken together, the group is racist.  Of course, they will deny that - "Islam isn't a race!" they will chant, covering their ears in case some information slips inside - but all racists deny it!  The KKK denies it!  Nazis deny it!  While they're not as bad as the KKK, they're still pretty darn racist.

It is also somewhat ironic, as Islamophobia is derived and sustained primarily by reactionary Christians!  Nietzsche said that god is dead but we will live for centuries in his shadow - this is what it looks like.  It looks like atheists, without consideration, enacting the principles of the very people they claim to reject.  (Pro tip: the reason why you want to acknowledge that the West is also the Christian world is that it helps you to see where your thinking is influenced by religious biases you consciously reject.  It's the same reason you should acknowledge that advertising works on you, so you can better observe its action on you with a mind to preventing it.)

(I didn't stay in the group to see what I figure will be a pretty big splurge of racism this coming weekend.  Freethought Dayton - which is run altogether by white people, which is almost entirely white - has a table at a local African-American cultural festival.  A bunch of white dudes will be trying to convince black people to be more like them!  As far as I could tell, none of them understood the cultural history of African-Americans and their relationship with churches - that from slave days, the church was the one place where they could go and NOT be watched by their overseers and masters.  It was the one place in all the world they could go to be safely black.  Lacking this kind of historical context - and it's not like I'm going to be there to tell it to them, now - I can only imagine that they'll come off as a bunch of patronizing crackers telling the Negroes how they're getting it all wrong.  It is my understanding that black people in America have seen quite a lot of this.)

Additionally, man, atheists are assholes.  I've noticed this whenever they get together - almost all of them seem bound and determined to prove they're the smartest person in the room.  Since no one knows everything, they often come off as real tools, speaking about things about which they have no knowledge because they can't stand the idea that someone, somewhere knows something they don't.  It's tedious.

It is also one of my bigger problems with a lot of religions - that show of utterly certainty, the inability to admit that maybe your book written in the Iron Age isn't 100% up to the challenges of the modern world, and the constant assertions that they're right and everyone else is wrong.  It's another way atheists are living in the shadow of god.  Until they learn to say "I dunno", they'll be perpetrating the same kinds of intellectual mummery as Christians.  Admittedly, about somewhat fewer things, but it'll still be there, poisoning the well for people like me.  I could have tolerated that if not for the racism, though.

Anyway, that's my review of Dayton Freethought.  While there are some good people there, there are too many racists for my taste - a culture that tolerates xenophobia and Islamophobia, and many members who express both.

Looking for houses in Xenia, Ohio

Last week, Adrienne and I went to Dayton, Ohio, to look at houses.  Well, more specifically, we went to Xenia, Ohio, which is a small town outside of Dayton, to look at houses.  We saw ten and are in the process of making a bid.  We have a couple of back-ups, too, just in case.  I won't say too much about the house until the bid is at least accepted.

(Unlike many people, apparently, we're not looking for a house to love.  We have a list of specific criteria and when a house met most or all of those criterion, it became a house we would be willing to bid on.  From that body of biddable houses, we simply selected the one we liked the most.  We have a couple of safeties in case things go poorly with our first bid, even.)

The trip was . . . pretty much everything we wanted it to be.  Even though Ohio is in the midst of a heat wave and the highs were only a couple degrees less than in Miami, the relative lack of humidity and the fact the evenings actually got cooler made the weather feel pretty perfect.  I can't remember being uncomfortable because of the weather at any point of the trip.

Additionally, Xenia has almost no traffic . . . and after three years of driving in Miami, little traffic suits us just fine.  Even in the middle of the day and during rush hour, the traffic went smoothly.

Going from Xenia to anywhere else means you drive down very quiet streets with rolling hills, with forests and fields.  The landscape around Xenia is downright charming and pastoral.  For Adrienne and I, this is a very good thing.

Even when we left the fairly rural confines of Xenia and went to Dayton - driving down interstates in "rush hour" traffic with considerable construction going on - it was a simple, straightforward drive without real difficulty (a little slowdown around one exchange).  And leaving town, to get to the interstate needed to go to Indiana, we had to drive through downtown Dayton just after rush hour and, again, no real traffic.  It was pretty awesome.

The biggest pleasure, for me, though, was how everyone was so goddamn friendly.  They smiled and engaged in chit chat.  They weren't sullen zombies robotically performing unpleasant tasks - and doing them poorly, at that.  In other places, I have gone on (and on and on) about the culture of dismal service and work performance in Miami, so it was consistently pleasurable to do transactions in Ohio because things happened in such a snappy, polite way.  The sudden and radical transformation that people undergo when they leave South Florida is profound and inexplicable . . . but real.  So getting out of that is like coming into sunshine after going through a frozen and wet cave for a really long time.  It's like magic.

This attitude seems to extend everywhere.  So, at FIU, there are no department events.  This is a change from UMO and UCSC where a couple of times a year, there'd be a barbecue around the 4th of July and a Christmas party.  At FIU, the department doesn't fraternize.  We were in Ohio for two days, but the department chair at Wright State University set up a cook out.

Our realtor is a great guy, too.  Unlike the array of scam artists, high pressure sales people and incomptent dregs that constituted our foray into real estate in the Miami market - before we met our current realtor - he was competent and friendly.  Not only do I like him, so far he's been good at his job, not only giving us trenchant advice about neighborhoods and houses, but girding himself for war as we prepare to make our bid - including reaching out to the other realtor to gauge the level of actual interest in selling.  (A house being on the market, technically, but the sellers not being willing to sell is quite common.  Apparently, it's hard to part with a house.)

In short, it was a great trip.  We are very much looking forward to moving to Ohio.  It appears that big city life isn't for us, but we're doing something to get out of it, so . . . Xenia, here we come!