God Save us from the Atheists

Gender souls win over the godless

In the culture wars, many of us have been pushing public intellectual figures to answer basic primary school questions like “can men be women?”  We don’t want to be mean, but the theoretical framework that has been built around what we have been calling “woke” rests on basic errors in science, logic, and empirical reality that we need to be corrected.  Some of my atheist friends have been pressing Richard Dawkins on this issue for some time. 

Christians have suggested in the past that Dawkins is a bit of a sissy for not addressing Islam with the same gusto as he has Christianity. This is a little unfair, as nobody should be expected to have a fatwa hanging over them for taking an intellectual position. As Christians, we make sport with Dawkins on this point to highlight that we are generally more reasonable as a group of people.  It’s a strange thing to be proud of, that we are not known for blowing up our ideological opponents, but there you have it.

Critics of gender ideology have suggested that Dawkins has lacked “stones” in his avoidance of saying that biological sex is real. For many, the idea that men and women of science would deny biological reality for cultural capital, for being on the “right side” or the “winning side” of the culture wars, seems like straight cowardice.

Finally, this week Dawkins has not just came out supporting scientific truth in relation to sex, but has gone one step further and has tweeted that he has signed the Declaration on Women’s Sex Based Rights prepared by Women's Human Rights Campaign (WHRC).  With each “coming out” we hope for the sanity to trickle down to a grass roots level, sanity may be a more than we can hope for.

My friend Ceri Black has also made a brave stand in the gender wars, but like the widow’s mite, her bravery has cost her far more than Dawkins is likely to pay. Ceri lives with her wife and two sons in Ireland.  She has made twitter threads about the risk to child protection in gender identity ideology. One thread was prompted by trans activist Laurie Penny when Penny suggested that children could turn their heads from the genitalia of transgender women when we are exposed to them in women’s spaces because to focus on genitalia is rude.  It became very clear to many of us that some of the “trans rights” that are claimed to be “human rights” violate the rights of the child to dignity and safety.

Ceri makes analogies with the blurring of boundaries around sex and gender and the kind of grooming that is involved in the sexual abuse of children. She does so with experience, academic grounding, and grueling examples from her personal life.

As a is a child sexual abuse (CSA) survivor, Ceri is more in tune with risks to CSA than most. To take the contrary stand to the LGBTIQ political movement, Ceri has paid a price, starting with the loss of the community and fellowship she once had with her broader allies in the LGBTIQ movement. If it was just this, and the general harassment and abuse she and her wife have endured for years, we may say that her stance is brave.

But Ceri’s tweets have now been reported to the police by a trans activist and recorded under Britain’s Non-Crime Hate Incident system, destroying her spotless criminal record.  She was contacted a few weeks ago by police to inform her that she is at risk of being charged and should present at the station.  Her legal advice was to wait for the police to come to her.  In the last few days police have come to her door to read her her rights. But no charges have yet been laid.  The enforcement of Britain’s hate crime laws in this way may contravene international human rights charters, but it is this process that is the punishment. The suspense, the fear of losing everything, the constant questioning by people of what you may have done to deserve police attention, the financial cost involved in seeking legal counsel. Ceri remains resolute and has prepared her children for what will happen if the police come and “put mummy in handcuffs for her tweets about child protection”.  Activists have doxed Ceri and embarked on a coordinated campaign of harassment. All for tweets that are still on Twitter and have not violated twitters famously draconian “community standards”.

As a long-time atheist, Ceri is this week commented on the Dawkins issue and was told by a prominent American atheist (Matt Dillahunty), that she was a liar and a fear-monger.  Dillahunty blocked Ceri because he is apparently a world-class debater and won’t waste his precious time with a lesbian with a PHD in gender studies. It appears that Dillahunty’s debating skills are much more tuned to argue against the scientific viability of the book of Genesis than the social constructive nature of biological sex.

Atheists seem to be falling into two categories, maybe they were always in these categories.  On one side are those who were genuinely engaging with religious people in philosophical and scientific debate, and then there were those who were engaging with Christianity in a hegemonic cultural battle.  Under the hegemony of the new woke atheists, we don’t just lose the boundaries around sexuality that Christianity placed on homosexuals, but we must abandon the facts that are defining the boundaries of our very existence. 

The atheist “debators” are known for the spectacle of defending a body of science that they had almost nothing to do with developing, against ancient religious texts.  They enjoyed owning the kind of people who take hope and meaning from ancient religions like the one I practice.  Their justification was that we, the religious, were responsible for wars and thought crimes against science.  That these irrational beliefs would lead us into error and again into the capture of the state with nonsense.  They were not entirely wrong about the dangerous appeal of nonsense.

That Dawkins has stood up for science and the rights of women is extremely important. But, Dawkins like Chappelle and Rowling before him, will not have to choose between being honesty about sex and feeding and protecting his children. Women like Ceri are paying a different kind of cost for telling the truth. Ceri understand that if we can’t define sex, if we can’t define ourselves in regard to sex and sexuality, we are forced to accept that others can violate our sexual boundaries. 

Where atheists were wrong, was not in the zeal to separate nonsense from government, but in identifying the kind of nonsense that is weaponised for social control. If I knew how to entangle nonsense from governments, I would be richer than I am, but I do know one small thing; we must refuse to persecute people in our own communities for dissent. Government do not have the resources to enact speech, thought and hate crime laws without the participation of the population. 

Authoritarians are heavily dependent on broad fear-based consent to enact the kind of cultural control they seek. I am not just referring to sex denialism here, but in all of the wrong-think we are told to accept in exchange for sparkling social capital.  In exchange for the cultural capital, you will be asked for active or passive persecution of your dissenting neighbour, that’s how this well-trodden path of authoritarianism works.  Dawkins may have sat on the fence for a while, but he chose correctly, and that’s how he will be remembered.  I guarantee there will be an opportunity for you to make a small choice in your work or community life soon.  It may cost you little but a scornful look, but it is a vital time to choose correctly.