In defense of the white male atheist
Offline Folks, this is going to be long winded but I think deservedly so. For some time I have pondered over the issues of race, gender and atheism often put forth on other sites (eg. pandagon, skepchick, Greta Christina, etc..). My overarching sentiment is annoyance (much like having only one arm, hanging from a cliff and unable to scratch that itching hemorrhoid) over this. And I happen to actually respect and admire those atheists most of the time. But, contrary to their opinions, race and gender have nothing to do with atheism.
As a Godless, brown skinned Indian, I would like to irrefutably state that atheist groups are not white male organizations. Barring the few a-hole atheist white supremacists, overall atheists are IMO the most tolerant bunch. So why all the fuss over demographics? So what if a particular group has mainly white males with white speakers (which for the record is not true)?
I think that those atheists who get their panties in a knot over this are really trying to subordinate atheism under specific ideological umbrellas (eg. feminism) because of the urge to make atheist groups "inclusive". That women and minorities have atheist narratives wholly different than white men should be the justification for diversity. It's not that white male atheists are overtly sexist and racist. Indeed, the argument goes that white men collectively occupy a position of privilege and shape the atheist discourse. And this patriarchical programming leads to unconscious biasing against traditionally marginalized groups ie. white male atheists are covertly racist and sexist. And I can defecate more of this postmodernist crap but I think I'll halt.
It's quite appalling the immaturity of such racist and sexist claims by these folks. I liken them to those who are outraged when women are not enrolled in clinical trials for prostate cancer. And despite their obvious high intellect on various atheist and rationalist matters, their intelligence vanishes as they ignore inexhaustable list of atheist/agnostic women and people of color:
Margaret Downey
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Ann Druyan
Kelly O'Connor
Eugenie Scott
Susan Jacoby
Reginald Finley
Wendy Kaminer
Nina Hartley
etc..
And some of these folks are presidential speakers of the so called "white male" atheist groups. And I suspect that those on this list are casually ignored by the PC atheists because they don't conform to a specific ideology. For example, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a feminist but she also defines herself as libertarian much to the ire of mainstream feminists. Similarly, I'm sure feminist Amanda Marcotte of pandagon would not stand shoulder to shoulder with fellow atheist and porn star Nina Hartley.
So what is the the fundamental mistake of calling an atheist group with mainly white members a "white male atheist group"? It is the notion that atheism is an ideology. Sorry Greta and Rebecca, atheism is the exact opposite of religion in this regard. There really is no racial or gender narrative that shapes atheism. Simply put, it is the unbelief in God. Period. It's all about the individual (NOT THE GROUP) who stands in opposition and defiance to the supernatural. It's an individual who favors science, reason and rationalism over superstition. And just because a group happens to consist of mainly white males does not mean that the path to this enlightened view is colored white or shaped like a penis.
Indeed it is religion! RELIGION! FUCKING RELIGION! It is religion that unfortunately shapes the atheist demographic. Women and minorities have been historically more subverted by this mind virus. If the goal is to diversify atheist groups then stop bashing white males as being the road blocks. Every white male atheist I know is tolerant, pro-choice, pro-diversity, pro-porn, anti-racist, pro-LGBT, etc.. And if Greta (who I do adore) still thinks that the discourse is shaped by a caucasian androcentric hegemony then I'M SO PROUD TO BE AN OREO COOKIE!!!!!!!!
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I've noticed people bitching about this. They seem to like to wrap their complaints in vaguely post-modern terminology. And they seem to have it out for white men. Which seems racist and sexist to me.
Stuff like this is what I'm talking about: http://www.daylightatheism.org/2009/12/the-white-stuff.html
Stuff like this raises my blood pressure. Rather than fretting over political correctness, we should probably be more concerned with getting others to be atheists regardless of what superficial demographic traits that they have.
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
I suspect it's primarily an educational bias.
Education is positively correlated with atheism. White males get better educations in Western society.
White women do get educations in many of the same institutions, but they are pushed away and discouraged (or at least traditionally have been) from the sciences (which would more likely actually have the effect of rectifying religious belief), and into the arts (which is far less likely to).
I suspect it's this "Science is for boys" attitude that is largely to blame, along with the abysmal funding public schools have in minority neighborhoods.
I respectifully disagree with this point. You are correct that women are discouraged from entering scientific professions. But I don't think that is the reason why women are more religious. I know many educated scientific women (one of them was my former Chair of Pathology at University of Ottawa--can't beat this place as a bastion of secularism) and the lion share are deeply religious. I think that religious indoctrination in the family is maldistributed and skewed towards brainwashing girls at such a young age. I agree that scientific ignorance is an easy path to sky daddy worship but scientific literacy does not guarantee that an individual will become an atheist.
Women are also encouraged to conform more than men, not be less aggressive in challenging authority. Religion is authority in America and to be an atheist you have to be a non-conformist to some degree.
Naturally there are exceptions.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
This skew may have something to do with what mellestad just suggested. It is an interesting theory... however, I have to wonder if you might also have a sample bias. Medicine tends to be a particularly conservative field (along with mathematics and computer science) in my experience.
Clearly we need more information all around. I have known quite a few female atheists, but usually they would tend never to say that they were (whereas the men I've known were more outspoken)- so it could possibly be that, as well, to a degree; less visibility for cultural reasons (as, again, mellestad hinted to).
Why bother getting apologetic at all?
This is the question I think all atheists should ask themselves: do you really want theists and atheists seeing each other as equals? Because... well, I SURE AS HELL DON'T!!
Take a more Machiavellian attitude towards theism, folks! Let the bible-thumping blatherers think they are superior to us in every way, and when their egoes and hubris becomes intolerable, USE this as a means of pushing them into realizing how primitive their thought patterns and ways of life are, when compared to us!
Almost by definition, atheists (or, more accurately, rationalists) are intellectually superior to Theists in nearly every way. Time to start acting like it and subtly suggest "Sorry, we couldn't be PAID to give a shit about your God-obsessed psychobabbling prejudices! ...unless it's Florida-lottery level money, then maybe we'll fake interest for all it's worth."
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
Oh shut up and go back to the 7-11 where you belong. (Note to self: Did I think that, or type it?)
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Ha! Check this out
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-jLKeXy6yI
One of my first jobs was at a 7-11 and my co-workers/bosses were a husband and wife from India. It is not a stretch or bigoted that the patrons had a hard time understanding them. At first I had a time trying to pronounce their names. But they also had a hard time saying mine. "Breeeeean" instead of "BrI an". But when push came to shove, what I loved the most about them is that they put up with me and my postal behavior when I felt overwhelmed by the pace and volume of customers.
I loved them, because they understood me and put up with me with all my flaws. Humans are human no matter what. My x-wife used to laugh at me when I tried to speak Japanese. If anyone can slaughter a language, Americans excel at it.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Perhaps partly. But I think we such that men had to trade something for sex, whereas women do not. Therefore nature endowed men with attributes like greater physical strength, competiveness and an affinity to develop technology. This enabled men to attain wealth that they could trade for sex.
I know this is not PC, but there is evidence that women don't handle the stress of combat nearly as well as men. The workplace is a kind of combat zone.
Depends on the religion, only in western Christianity is there a major gender gap(60% female) of ardent adherents. The ratio of male to female atheists is around 2:1. In other religions there is no gender gap in favor of women. Do you think there are many women anxious to live under the Taliban?
In western Christianity, religion is very hostile to male sexuality(i.e. promiscuity, visual/sensual stimulation) and very accommodating to female sexuality(i.e. fidelity, romanticism). I think this has a lot to do with gender gap as well.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
I haven't heard of this study. Link please?
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
It was a story I heard on the news that women were in PTSD combat treatment way more that men. Here is a study that lays it out:
http://www.womenshealthresearch.org/site/DocServer/PTSD_in_Women_Returning_From_Combat--reduced_file_size.pdf?docID=2661
From an evolutionary view of things, I don't see how this could not be the case. Men were the ones expected to fight and battle for millions of years, so how could males not have better coping mechanisms? But in our modern PC world, what should be obvious is attacked. There is nothing sexist about this, if males could be made to have a baby, we'd obviously not be able to handle the stress of pregancy and infant care as well as women.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
Of course they do. Women don't do all the macho shit about how they can "take it". Women generally go to the doctor, go to see a psychologist, more often than men because we ain't as stupid.
You guys have been tossing around a lot of bullpucky. Can't handle stress? Try it sometime. I went back to school to get my engineering degree with 3 sons, extremely irregular child support, and a part time job. I graduated with a 3.4 by studying at 2am after I had fed kids and pets, helped the kids with their homework, did the dishes, and a little housework. In addition, two of my boys are special ed. And this is less stress than a job? I always looked forward to work so I could deal with the little stresses of the job and forget about the mess at home for a few hours of "downtime".
The reason women don't do well at science and math is due to inadequate teaching. Even teachers who claim to be feminists, give boys more complete answers and assistance. Girls are short changed in time and support. (It was a study in the early 1990s. I haven't bothered to search for it.) You know how I got answers from one of my professors? I asked the guy sitting next to me to ask my question. He would get a great answer. If I asked, I would get told it was intuitively obvious. I got wise real quick and took comprehensive notes.
The reason women don't do well in the work force is because of everyone's attitudes - men and women. "I have led my last four projects to under time and under budget conclusions." "Yes, but I just don't see you in a managerial position."
You poor white guys just get pissed on all the time. Beat on your manly chests oh mighty hunters. I'm sure someone will be impressed.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
Wouldn't a smart person avoid stressful situations rather than try to "handle" it in the first place.
There is legal discrimination against men, if you are woman in your profession, you get free scholarships and unmerited placement. You can receive government contracts unavailable to male run businesses. Men can't use sex to advance their careers as women are often able to do.
Why do think sex differences even exists in the first place? I mean you believe that females are highly superior, better able to take care a family, bear children, fight wars, work better than men. Shouldn't asexual reproduction of females have offered far better advantages than the current system? How did such a thing evolve where one gender is so far superior and more adapted to survival than the other?
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
This is likely the prevailing factor. Men just go off the rocker and hurt people they love unintentionally, rather than seek help when they should.
I don't imagine there are very many people at all, men or women, who don't need PTSD counseling- it should be mandatory after a war to regain reentry into society.
I think that's all I said; I hope you weren't overgeneralizing with the "you guys".
This is about as much to the point as "If Einstein was so smart, how come he's dead?"
I don't think anybody has claimed that females are overall superior here, but I can address this evolutionary issue:
Asexual reproduction is far inferior to sexual reproduction, because it doesn't allow for genetic mixing in multicellular organisms- this prevents the evolutionary advantage of a gene pool: in order to have the genetic toolset available to adapt to environments quickly, genetic diversity is essential.
This is why animals with populations of under a hundred individuals are at extreme risk of extinction; once all organisms are closely related to eachother, they don't have the diversity in immune systems needed to properly keep up with pathogens, among other traits of genetic diversity that allow adaptation and evolution in the short term.
You are forgetting sexual reproduction by hermaphroditic organisms here- your argument should have probably been "why can't females just impregnate each other".
Sexual dichotomy has advantages over hermaphroditism in that it establishes a fraction of the population is expendable.
Yes, males are evolutionarily expendable. In fact, most of them are supposed to be expended, and when they aren't, that's when you get some serious social problems.
Anyway, what this means is that genes can express themselves more strongly in males to either beneficial or detrimental effect (usually detrimental), and thus war it out without sacrificing the ability of the species as a whole to yield the next generation.
For one example: Men are both more intelligent and less intelligent than women (the bell curve has more to either side, and less in the middle); evolution doesn't know which genes yield the greatest intelligence (or this deviation could be due to factors such as attention span); it's cautious with females, but allows those genes to be expressed strongly in males resulting in slightly more geniuses, and significantly more f*cktards (hoping the f*cktards will be killed off, so the next generation of females can benefit from this experiment).
This is likely part of the reason why a disproportional number of the greatest minds in history have been male (even with prejudice against women), and it's also why the majority of men are complete idiots compared to the average woman.
Anyway, this does result in a small number of men who may be better suited to certain tasks than women- but virtually none who are better suited at all of them- with the exception of sexually dimorphic strength differences, which are slight and evolved only to ensure the ability of males to keep and protect harems and NOT due to some disadvantage of being able to bear children (thus culling out the less suitable males from potential reproduction).
The expression of greater strength is pretty much the only thing makes have going for them on average. Stronger gene expression produces some occasionally phenomenal individuals, but on average random over-expression is detrimental (as most mutations are), and then on top of that we throw in the sexually selected handicaps, and the average male isn't looking very good to make up for the slightly greater strength.
What do I mean by handicaps? If you will survey many sexually dimorphic species, you'll find the males often express bright colours, and often with strange and largely useless appendages (largely useless, except perhaps to gore each other- those rare ones that are really useful usually occur in females too).
Those bright colours- in birds and lizards, for example- exist to make it harder for the males to not get eaten. That draws predation away from the more valuable females, and while they don't think about it this much, females find the brighter colours more attractive because a male that was able to survive despite the bright colouration is obviously more fit than the lame brown one that got along without much work- fit in ways aside from the colours, [the colours] which the females (who are all that matter to the next generation) don't express.
All of that fitness it to benefit the female lineage, not the male one, because that's the one that produces the next generation.
Not all animals have a 1:1 male to female relationship- look into this for a bit more insight into the evolutionary purposes if you're curious.
I'm not sure if any of that is useful to the debate at hand, however.
Sometimes your choices are limited. The ex divorced me and I had to get up to speed supporting children since he very obviously sucked at it unless he was living with them. Running out and getting remarried seemed to be a bad choice at the time. And, some stress in your life is apparently necessary for optimal health. At least so some studies seem to indicate.
Aren't all scholarships free? And if you would kindly point out to me where I can get unmerited placement, I would be grateful as I could really use it at the moment. Even with unmerited placement and government contracts, woman run businesses and woman executives are still in a minority. Even though women outnumber men. And I have never wanted to advance my career using sex - ewwwww...... You haven't seen my bosses.
And I never have sold sex.
See Blake's post. My own personal feelings are that my husband provides a lot of positive contributions to our relationship - upper body strength, height, he cooks, sews, can fix anything, sucks at housework, but hey, none of us are perfect.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
Nah, not all of you guys, just a bunch. I wasn't going to contribute to this thread as I honestly do not want to known as the feminist in the group. But it was getting a little ripe.
I agree with what you posted just wanted to add a little information here.
I took evolutionary biology some years ago. One of our labs was to run a program where you could enter various proportions of male to female and it would give you an answer about whether your parameters resulted in a sustainable population. My best recollection was 1 male to 1000 females and the population could survive.
All I remember is the program ran on a mainframe and had a text interface. Not surprising for the mid 80s.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
But don't you find it ironic that we're bombarded with "women can do anything men can do even better" and "If women were running the world we wouldn't have war and economic crisis." But then we have all these books, magazines, TV shows about women dealing with their stress. If smart women are supposed to compete with men, why are their lives so stressful doing so?
For women there are tons of scholarships in the technical fields unavailable to men.
Mostly government work. Start a 'woman owned' business to subcontract on various projects. You don't have to work that hard, the prime contractors are required to give out a portion of the work to women and minority owned businesses. Just look up who is bidding on government contracts then send them a proposal as a woman owned business, you get some free $$$ for very little work.
Blake's post is just the Politically correct facts. The fact is men have had to provide something of value for sex, whereas women have not through out our evolutionary history. So men have developed some attributes in greater abundance than women. But Political Correctness trumps science so we can't discuss this.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
I find waaaaaaay too many assumptions in this thread in general (big surprise), but this post contains a whole lot.
I do not think, in any way, a liberal arts eduction is any less likely to dissuade someone from theism than a hard science education. Do you know how vast "the arts" are? How much thought, although not empirical, has been contributed making compelling cases against theism? Hell, even researching modern art could be enough to turn someone on to atheism. Think of all the modern artists, their stories, their inspirations... you'd have to learn all of this in "the arts," whereas in science, your professors would be afraid of making any vaguely anti-theist statement, considering opinion and science are generally not a great combination. In liberal arts, your teacher can be unafraid of explaining a feminist, atheist, marxist, etc. interpretation of a novel, ethnography, painting, etc. And as a student, you are ENCOURAGED to have your interpretation, as long as it is justified by an argument, making "theist" interpretations almost impossible to advance. In my undergrad work in the Humanities, I think I encountered one, maybe two, theists, and the overwhelming majority of my fellow students and professors were agnostic.
Sorry for the rant, I am just one of those atheists who appreciates science while not wanting to be a scientist, and I don't like to see the sentiment of "WE JUST NEED TO TEACH MORE SCIENCE AND THE THEISM WILL GO AWAY" argument. Teaching science is good on its own merits (economically, ethically); it unfortunately will have no affect on theism. Theism will adapt to any scientific knowledge, because it has to in order to survive. There are large structures and billions of people who will do anything to help theism survive. We need to acknowledge that.
How the heck should I know? Maybe it's because men still don't do their fair share of housework or child care even if the woman has a full time job. And yes, men do more on average than they used to, but they are still lagging. And some of it is the woman's attitude. I know women who get uptight if their husband lifts a finger. I don't know why, but then my mother and my grandmother both worked full time outside the home. I haven't a clue how stay at home mothers manage to keep amused all day.
I fail to see how that is unmerited. Any guy could do the same. And I don't believe they are required to put out even 50% to women or minority owned businesses. I think the requirement is much less than 50%. So that means an awful lot of white guys also have a chance at this unmerited contract work.
I just don't know where you get some of your ideas. I remember being young and unattached. And I remember a lot of evenings spent alone. Maybe if a person is some sort of hot babe, they have men offering them gifts and dinner for sex. Sure didn't work for me. Women also provide something of value for sex. Their time. If the relationship is long term, their freedom and labor. Sometimes their self-esteem. Relationships are give and take and as you so often have said, we are all in it for self interest.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
I just want to say, as a longtime (chuckle) white male, I do not feel under attack or any other of the paranoid things that the average down-on-his-luck white guy says to excuse his failure, failure both understandable and justified. The bottom line is, we are all struggling, well, at least it seems that way. And we all fail, last time I checked. I fail both because of things I have done, and some things I don't really think were in my power: but was it because of being white? It just seems like a weird thing to reach for, and sort of irrelevant. I do very much believe institutional racism and the leftovers from our past are still very much alive; so I am not surprised to get a little kick in the **** every now and then by some pissed of descendants of the ancestors that my ancestors treated like non-humans. It is my goal to work with all people to understand how we fix those old systems. It doesn't help to get all defensive.
I also acknowledge that although I don't think of myself as privileged, it's all of a matter of perspective
I live in an amazing century, in an amazing country. Think about that in the global perspective, or chronologically.
A weird assumption, though, is that women and minorities are somehow more susceptible to the theist myth; I highly doubt this. I just think that your culture is your culture, and certain cultures are more "dug in" theistically speaking. But, thankfully, cultures change, and we can't act like Western culture is the only one that does so!
Having had a liberal arts education (including modernist and post-modernist literature, and modern art), and a science education, I can attest to the fact that these ideas *are* generally addressed in literary and visual arts courses-- however, it has not been my experience that the students get much out of them in that regard.
A scientist can believe in a deistic god of the gaps at most- an artist can be just as crazy as he or she wants, and present "inspiration from Jesus" without an eye-bat from peers out of political correctness.
It's not as much a difference in what is taught, but in the acceptance from peers- those peers who avoid you and will think you're bat-shit crazy in a field of science (such as if you believe in creationism), thus giving you interpersonal shame, and result in actual critical reassessment; in art, bat-shit-crazy is A-O.K., and no actual re-evaluation of world view is needed to succeed professionally or socially (some small portion of people will be critical, but will be unable to articulate that criticism, and will ultimately say "that's cool dude, to each his/her own"- where a science student will more likely ridicule in private, and just avoid social contact with people who talk about religion frequently).
Well rounded educations are useful, of course- particularly social history, and actual study of the mythology in question- but a science education is indispensable where an art education is otherwise useless to these ends- it is only the small parts of the classes (or the small fraction of class offerings) that acts as modern social history that are useful.
Learning to throw, sculpt, print, paint, write poetry, or compare Frankenstein to Beowulf in an essay, and practicing visual and writing techniques does not contribute to secular thought, and the general zeitgeist of the average liberal arts student community is strongly "spiritual", and "nobody is wrong"- because, in general, they really don't have their facts down.
Wow, I completely disagree with 100% of what you just wrote.
Can I just pull out one quote in particular?
"Learning to throw, sculpt, print, paint, write poetry, or compare Frankenstein to Beowulf in an essay, and practicing visual and writing techniques does not contribute to secular thought"
This could not be more wrong.
Personally having acquired most of these skills in an academic setting- I can do all of the above- I can not say a single one of those practical crafts influenced my ability to think rationally and scientifically in any positive way. Any delusional theist can do them just as well as I, given the talent. My teachers were mostly atheist, and we talked about that sort of thing- but that's because I elected to take classes from Atheist teachers (whom I liked more).
It's easy to list current day masters of each of these crafts who are fundamentalist creationist theists from any number of religions (particularly as they're easy to find, expressing their faiths through their 'art'). It's substantially more difficult to list such high achievers in scientific fields, and one can be fairly sure that none are taken seriously who express their faiths through creative application of science.
But please, do explain how these learned skills at all contribute to secular thought, when they can be just as easily used to make Jesus Kitsch.
So you want me to explain how the range of human thought contributes to secular thought? Think that one over for a minute.
Did you actually get a liberal education, or are you referring to G.E. classes you took while pursuing a hard science degree?! You seem to be confused about what the Humanities and Arts encompasses.
I thought that making scientists and engineers take a bunch of G.E. classes made a college a liberal arts college?
"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
British General Charles Napier while in India
The way it works is a big contractor like Lockeed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, etc... will put in a bid for big government contracts. They use subcontractors in the proposal, a significant percentage of these companies must be 'woman owned' or 'minority owned'. If they don't do this, they don't get the contract. So if they are short on woman owned businesses, they will give out an unmerited contract. It is not so much having a certain percentage, it just trying to get powerful congress people to support your bid. White guys must always win on merritt, trickery or bribery.
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
People pursuing liberal arts degrees hardly get a "range of human thought". I want you to explain how a music, visual art, or English degree contributes to secular thought (with the very small exception of the modernist literary period, which I will grant as a small contribution due to the nature of the literature and the obligatory history OF SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT necessary to explain its context).
I know what the humanities and arts encompass; and yes, it is broad, but excludes any notable science education. It's pretty much everything outside of science- and without science, there's no solid challenge to dogma, and when there is, there's no knowledge to really accomplish it. Most people in science education don't even learn the scientific method properly; I have met precious few graduates outside of science who have even the slightest grasp.
And yes, I did get a liberal arts education- one major and one minor.
Yea, I know how it works. White guys win on merit, trickery, bribery and let's not forget nepotism or good ol' boy networks. If that is your idea of unfair treatment, all I can say is ------ pooooor baby.
-- I feel so much better since I stopped trying to believe.
"We are entitled to our own opinions. We're not entitled to our own facts"- Al Franken
"If death isn't sweet oblivion, I will be severely disappointed" - Ruth M.
Feminist ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
sarcasm