Last night I watched a section on TV3’s Campbell Live about the treatment of a campus atheist club at the University of Lincoln entitled “Atheist uni students’ posters torn down” (follow the link to view the video). This story went into detail about how the clubs posters have been regularly ripped down and defaced.
The presenter, Natasha Utting, was quite shocked that this could happen at a university and they suggested the club was being targeted. The story began,
“Universities are traditionally the bastions of critical thought, champions of diversity and free expression – a melting pot of ideas where debate is encouraged. So who is trying to censor a student club at Lincoln University – and why are they being bullied for their beliefs?”
Now, first up, I want to say whoever defaced these posters was wrong to do so, the way to respond to campus atheist clubs is to take on and refute their ideas. But what surprised me with this piece was the idea that this was news worthy of prime time mention and a more in depth analysis than the 8 second sound-bite approach of the news. The reason I say this is because in my 11 years at University I was never involved in an advertising campaign of any sort for any group (and I was involved with several) where my posters were NOT ripped down or defaced. This is the norm on New Zealand University noticeboards. The posters about the Library’s opening hours get ripped down and defaced!
Now, I am not saying I think this is good. I am just puzzled that now suddenly when an atheist club’s posters are torn down it attracts attention of the magnitude of Campbell Live.
In 1996 I was involved in the leadership of a campus Christian group that was asked by the student union to leave campus for the offence of handing out pamphlets. We were threatened with security by the student president. This was made abundantly clear to the media at the time and made known to the politicians. I remember Dr Liz Gordon from the Alliance Party telling me in a Select Committee hearing on the whether student union membership should remain compulsory or not telling me “this is normal campus life” when I mentioned the incident.
In 1996 a man was asked to leave campus by Waikato University staff for preaching on campus. I witnessed it and complained to the student editor who ran a story on it.
As to posters, when I was campaigning for election to the student union executive our campaign team had a three hourly postering shift in place which we maintained throughout each day beginning at 4am where we put up posters. Why? Because the minute we had completed a postering run of the entire campus our opponents would tear them down. We had to finish and then promptly go back to the starting point to replace the torn and defaced posters.
I campaigned (successfully) for a position on the student union three times. I also campaigned in 3 referenda. Every time, it was the norm for posters to be ripped down and defaced and every time we always had at least a few days right before the ballot where we’d have to put in place 3 hourly postering rosters.
When I left Waikato to study at Otago University the same common practice of poster defacement was there. In one infamous incident involving Madeleine at Otago University, which made the lead story of every New Zealand news program and the front page of more than one major newspaper, a Labour Cabinet minister was involved in poster thwarting – he pinned Madeleine’s arm to her side to prevent her from holding a poster up in the background shot of a campus interview with the then Prime Minister. At the same time several Labour Party officials tore posters out of other students hands. Shortly before this campus visit by the Prime Minister, members of Labour youth and several Government members of Parliament were seen, by myself and many others, combing the university noticeboards, prior to the arrival of the media, and ripping down all posters critical of the government!
Campus Christian groups I was involved with routinely faced poster destruction – every time we put up posters up around campus they were defaced or ripped down. Posterers from our group were more than once harassed as they went around campus postering – the more timid of our group would not put posters up for this reason and posterers always went postering in pairs for safety. This was hardly news or shocking to anyone, we expected it, it was the norm. We typically had a large numbers of back-up posters and ran postering shifts to check the notice boards precisely because this always happened.
Poster desecration was only the half of it. Censoring or being subjected to vicious personal attacks in student media was far more concerning.
In 1995 I submitted an article for publication which defended the resurrection of Christ in response to an attack already published in Nexus, the University of Waikato student magazine. After refusing for weeks to print it (I had to become the proverbial squeaky wheel). The sub-editor published it with a picture of a naked man praying the rosary alongside with my name captioned under it. It appeared I was posing nude for the article.
In 1997 when Madeleine was at the height of her campus fame for being the president of the campus pro-life club and an outspoken critic of compulsory student union membership she received a note made from cut up newspaper letters saying “You Shut up or I’ll make you bitch”.
She too suffered from the attention of the student editor. In 1997 not a single issue of Nexus was published without her name being in it somewhere – usually in a lewd context. One example we found in a review of a comedy, “I haven’t laughed so hard since the editor sat down and broke Madeleine Richards’ nose.” Another was when a photo of a half-naked woman jumping out of a cake (who looked a lot like Madeleine) was published next to a photo of Madeleine with the heading “Deja Vu?” Much effort was put into making Madeleine into a campus sex-symbol for her attractiveness – this was seen as ironic for a pro-life Christian woman.
In 1999 I was student President at Waikato, Madeleine was Vice-President and we had been married for a year when we discovered she was pregnant. We lost our baby. On Madeleine’s first day back in office after getting out of hospital an anonymous letter was left at the student union office, which mocked and ridiculed the death of our child and cited our religious and moral beliefs as justification for his comments, “I hope the memory of the death of your unborn child haunts you forever as you deserve.”
Nexus then published letters from members of the campus queer group claiming Madeleine deserved to receive this letter for being “homophobic”. Madeleine needed to ask herself why she was so hated.
Our time at Otago University was no better (as I wrote in Studying at Otago University no Riot). At the time I studied there, Madeleine was battling obesity (a medical condition she has since overcome having lost around 50kg). The student newspaper, Critic, found a link to her weight-loss support site that showed progress-pictures of her weight-loss (despite her name never featuring on it) and encouraged students to visit the site and laugh at her. They published pictures of fat women eating hamburgers and similar derogatory pictures on their website and said it was her. They regularly permitted comments about her allegedly stuffing her face to be published – often writing them themselves.
Critic also published false comments about my wife flashing her “bush” in public. It also published discussions of what it would be like to have sex with someone as “hideous” as her. She was repeatedly referred to as “middle-aged” and a “mother” in a derogatory manner.
Then came the obsession with her breasts; someone in Critic claimed falsely that Madeleine had accused a Labour MP of fondling her breasts (this was the poster incident I referred to above). We informed them this was false, offered to show them what Madeleine had actually said (they had originally reported it almost accurately) but it was to no avail. They continued to run with the breast story, making reference to it several more times throughout the year, culminating in nominating her breasts for an end of year award and published false claims that she deliberately thrust her breasts in front of people.
When Critic nominated Madeleine for their New Zealander of the Year award they cited, as one of the reasons, her success at managing “to distance herself … and her young daughters from [Graham Capill’s] penis.” [Graham Capill is a convicted paedophile]
When, as a student, I formally complained about all this to the University. I was told it was not their jurisdiction as the student newspaper was not part of the University. Complaints to the student union were dismissed on the grounds that this was just good humour; something I was apparently lacking.
And if you think this is limited to Otago, in 1997, twice in 2002 and once in 2009 Auckland University Students Association effectively banned pro-life clubs from campus. They refused to allow any such club to be affiliated and use the services they paid for in enrolment. When I challenged the President of the students association on this very issue he told me the student union had a policy of not allowing pro life clubs to exist. Members of the various pro-life groups that have attempted over the years to set a campus group up have not only had their posters defaced and removed but have also suffered viscous personal attacks in campus media.
I can tell you tales from Massey University. In 1997 I was contacted by a very distraught friend. He had put some posters up advertising a pro-life club and he’d had an article critiquing the pro-abortion position published in the student magazine. In response, a PhD student from the women’s studies department posted posters around the university naming my friend and claiming he supported killing women, starving the poor to death and so on.
The same student magazine later published comments claiming, in all seriousness, that Madeleine and I supported heresy laws and advocated the death penalty for violation.
Last year a pro-life club from Canterbury University wrote to me asking for advice. Guess why? Their posters were being ripped down and defaced.
So really the fact that a university club had their posters ripped down and defaced is not really news or a revelation. The media, the university and the student associations have been aware of it for years. I have brought these issues to all of the above, on more than one occasion, I am not the only person who has done so either. I know for a fact that more than one person has included them in submissions to parliament. Moreover, I have followed the careers of some of my fellow students who witnessed all of this first hand and in some cases themselves perpetuated these activities – they now have careers as politicians, public servants, journalists and press secretaries. Maybe TV3 only read mail from atheist students…
In last night’s show, after noting the Posters had been ripped down, Utting went on to note that, after going to the media, the club were informed they may have to appear before a university (or student union panel) to discuss the appropriateness of bringing the media into a campus issue. At this point the reporter was flabbergasted, she said she had never heard of a situation where a university did this. She also said she had never heard a hint of someone facing potential discipline for something like this.
One wonders how deeply she researched. Because in 1998, the Assignment Program approached Madeleine and I to interview us about abortion for a documentary they were filming. They asked to film us running a stall on campus. Officials high in the University called Madeleine and I into an urgent meeting. They informed us that we were not to talk to the media on campus without their consent and they demanded that the only way they would consent to the filming was if we hired (with our own money) a security guard for the filming. This was just in case another student got aggressive towards us as the university would look bad on camera if we were assaulted (Madeleine had been assaulted during a student debate and has also made more than one formal complaint about other students threatening her to the student mediator). Assignment ended up very reluctantly footing the bill for the security guard, and made a point of noting it on air.
And as to disciplinary hearings, they could have dug out the article in the Waikato Times noting how the Waikato Student Union tried to have me expelled from life membership in 2000. The reason, according to Nexus, as that my religious beliefs meant I was “homophobic.” Apparently, the best thing I did for Waikato University was to “leave it.” My beliefs about abortion were also added as justification. The meeting failed for want of a quorum – I wasn’t even given notice of it. I offered to defend my views at the next attempt and they never got around to calling it.
So again, I simply don’t get why this is news. It is terrible that the atheist club were treated this way, I do not condone it in any shape or form. Nor do I condone the student union’s apparent lack of concern but my point is that this has been going on for years. Debate amongst undergrads has been conducted this way for decades. Student Unions have been complicit in it and have supported it for decades. Politicians have known about it and any medis have experienced it first hand and have been told by multiple people, multiple times of its occurrence for decades.
New Zealand Universities are intolerant places that get captured by factions who seek to control the flow of information and promote only their view by intimidating and censoring. The fact atheist students have now suffered is terrible but Christian and conservative groups have had to put up with this stuff for decades. I can’t help wondering if because it is now atheists that this is why the secular lefties in Campbell Live are suddenly shocked and concerned.
Tags: Atheist Club · Campbell Live · Natasha Utting · University of Lincoln32 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
“Universities are traditionally the bastions of critical thought, champions of diversity and free expression – a melting pot of ideas where debate is encouraged”
Yeah, now it’s a brain washing tool for the secular
Now?
What gets me is that the board they show seems to have had EVERY poster torn down…
Yes Max, I noticed that too.
I also think that the pictures of the blusterous stranger who comes up and pulls them down, complete with “close ups” of his arms and no other part of the body must have been staged, otherwise there continual question “Why did this ? ” could be answered with, “how about we stop zooming on his arms, zoom back and look at his face and then we’ll know”…
This is precisely why I plan to buy a beat up old truck for my “Born OK the First Time” bumper sticker.
And people wonder why students are increasingly despondent about politics.
You guys should get Sarah Palin over here on a speaking tour.
Vitriol starts in Three…Two…One..
The attacks levelled on right-leaning women are something else.
I was suprised by the naivety of the president of the Athiest Club. Posters get torn down or defaced. Student newspapers are neither balanced or fair.
The student unions have been the playground of the left for as long as I can recall (one of my good friends was once banned from womenspace at Auckland in the early 1980s for (a) being a model and (b) having the temerity to defend Miss Auckland AND not have a Y chromosone.
If the Athiest group is promoting a charity, and doing good, all power to them.
But there is a fairly large group who *like* the fact things are torn down and the right wing suffer personal attacks. They want to keep ungoodthinking in a post modern cone of silence.
(As a result, all the real conversations of interest at Uni used to go on in private, where there is no censorship… and then are melded into ideas that one can publish. Now, these ideas are placed on blogs. This breaks the monopoly on discourse — that the goodthinkers thought they had). It saddens me that they are impeding something worthwhile that is happening… but I am not at all suprised by this.
Hmph. I was suprised by the *faux* naivety of the president of the Athiest Club.
As I said on halfdone “In fact, I suspect the person(s) doing this have been taught from bitter experience that atheists consider it ok to take down opposing advertisements.”
It’s a ridiculous story at all levels.
When religious folks are the perpetrators, the media start to wave their arms behind a thin veil of toleration.
Here in the US it is somewhat similar. I used to be a Leftist because they were “compassionate”. Then I transferred around to various colleges and was shocked by the hatred and vitriol of many professors and stuff in the campus newspapars toward conservatives and especially Christian conservatives. I realized it’s a big hoax. Like animal farm, some groups are more equal than others. On college campuses, if you are Liberal, you are considered a good person, and conservatives are bad, and you can be as mean as you want to be. I became conservative, well, centrist conservative, and lost my faith in education. The people that I knew that were most educated were the most nasty, cruel, unfair, knee-jerk liberals I had ever come across. But I have to admit, the atmosphere of hate is seductive, and it took me awhile to see what was going on. I think there is more hatred ironically in the name of “compassion” at Universities in the West than what you’ll find in the average madrassa teaching jihad.
Stop the press! Posters were torn down at a university!
I have never torn down a poster but I am overwhelmingly guilty of drawing on posters and putting up posters for the sheer joy of irritating those putting up Marxist posters. I’m a terrible person but it brings joy to so many. That said, in most cases my own posters are, sadly, destroyed.
This all brings back a comment I once heard.
“Theres nothing more narrow minded than a liberal”
I feel for your loss Matt about the apparent double standard Secularists and liberals have in being the priviledged and respected position because they’re the established culture in contemporary society today.
Everyone knows that right wingers and conservatives are crazy fundamentalists with holy books and guns, yet not everyone knows that people who condemn such people are essentially prone to scapegoating, vitriolic and discriminatory acts because they believe they’re superior to the other group.
Charles Taylor mentions the angst of a japanese buddhist who once upon a time attended a German green lefty meeting and went away with the same bad taste as that of Jim; Its also worth mentioning that pro-life groups here in Canada were even censored by the Universities of Alberta and York not to present their case in a debate at least for York.
The censorship was so bad, even the skeptics association at York complained to the University to have the pro-lifers (not all of which were religious by the way) have their say in the debate.
Seriously, the fundy atheists and liberals are starting to become an intolerant ideological state similar to that of European Christendom and Marxist China based on the signs. The fundy atheologians see the blinders in other people, but their obviously blind to their own fanaticism masking it in the name of tolerance, intelligence etc.
@ Alvin:
“The censorship was so bad, even the skeptics association at York complained to the University to have the pro-lifers (not all of which were religious by the way) have their say in the debate.
Seriously, the fundy atheists and liberals are starting to become an intolerant ideological state similar to that of European Christendom and Marxist China based on the signs. The fundy atheologians see the blinders in other people, but their obviously blind to their own fanaticism masking it in the name of tolerance, intelligence etc.”
Sorry mate, but can you not see the contradiction between the two paragraphs.
Actually, its not a contradiction to point out factionalism within the ranks of unbelief Paul. Some hate Dawkins, some love him.
Also Paul,
Its one thing to say that an atheist student group holds a position of pro-choice and another thing to make the pro-choice position favoured by the higher ups at a secular liberal arts university like York, where religious views hold no sway over policies.
Picture the atheist group as luther and the York student admin as the Pope, then secularism in the back drop providing the general cultural atmosphere in which the two engage in. No surprise, though, given the fluidity of options and viewpoints when atheism is combined with an individualistic culture in the west. Some atheists would love to see religion banned or insult their fellow human but religious believers as mentally ill, others are indifferent etc.
This is a world-wide phenomenon. The university goobermentals do not really want ideas to be debated. Such people apparently do not realize is that eventually all sides of all issues will no longer want to debate the issues, although by that time the selective toleration crowd itself may be the first to get the message. In today’s academic environment, the free-play-of-ideas theme is a joke.
The consequence of all this is, as Allan Bloom stated in The Closing of the American Mind, that the universities are now like refugee camps where all the geniuses have been run off by an unfriendly regime.
Alvin, One interesting thing here, I was present at the two meetings in 2001 where the student union voted on the question of wether a pro life should be allowed to affiliate ( and hence have access to the club resources they had paid for). The most common reason given were the kinds of arguments you hear in Hitchens, Harris and so forth, religion is evil, it causes wars, its responsible for witch hunts, its responsible for the inquistion, its sexist and intolerable and so forth, it was like a mantra repeated over and over again,
So the lesson we get from this is, atheist student groups can dish it out, but they can’t take it.
There’s a surprise.
Have you forwarded this to Campbell Live? At least then, when they don’t run an immediate retraction, you know which side of the fence they’re on.
One of Vox’s observations concerning atheists of the Dawkins/Hitchens/student union type is that some people are assholes because they’re atheists, others are atheists because they’re assholes. It’s the reason that agnostics tend to find religious people less objectionable than the atheists they ostensibly have more in common with philosophically.
Just a thought….
Why not use those lockable display boards, like the ones we use at our school. That way the posters are protected while on display.
Seems a simple enough solution to me and would keep everyone happy as well.
“Just a thought….
Why not use those lockable display boards, like the ones we use at our school. That way the posters are protected while on display.
Seems a simple enough solution to me and would keep everyone happy as well.”
Not really practical.
(I) People are constantly putting up all sorts of notices – not just for political things, but for flatmates, they are selling their car, they want a lift to Christchurch, etc etc… if people has to get a key to put up notices… well no one would bother
(II) This would then give some person/people the authority to decide which notices could be put up and which ones shouldn’t…. with the petty mindedness of pretty much ALL student politicians I have ever met – this would not lead anywhere good… and to a lot more censorship than the odd fundy (of whatever persuasion) tearing notices down…
Given the lack of respect shown to other peoples notices, it would seem highly optimistic to think a notice cabinet would survive.
Matt, I agree with you,
They keep spouting this shit about the sins of pseudo-christian forms in ages past and then using it as a prima facie evidence to generalize that Christianity is crap. I’m not saying atheists argue like this. It’s just this argument has now become generalized amongst lay secularists as a rational credo, when its really emotional bull.
The following snippet below from Tektonics: http://www.tektonics.org/lp/outrage.html
“Many critics of the Bible use of a tactic called “argument by outrage” (if you like Latin phrases, call it argumentum ad cerebrosus, per a reader’s suggestion). It runs more or less like this:
The critic finds some event in the Biblical text that they find morally offensive: The slaughter of the Canaanites; the stoning of the man who picked up sticks on the Sabbath, eternal punishment.
The critic recounts this event in such a way as to imply that by itself, the event is enough of a moral outrage that there can be no argument or counter to it.
Or as Glenn Miller has put it, similarly:
….an individual’s personal moral intuitions, if they run counter to moral intuitions of other experts and peers, may need further analysis and qualification, before they could function plausibly in constructing a logical argument of God’s non-existence.
In other words, the argument that I THINK someone might make about this might look like the following:
The biblical God CANNOT commit any unjust act (Authority: theological tradition)
God ordered the killing of children (Authority: biblical text)
The killing of children can never be a ‘just’ act, regardless of competing ethical demands in a given situation. (Authority: someone’s personal moral intuition)
God, therefore , ordered an ‘unjust act’. (authority: substitution of terms)
The ordering of an ‘unjust act’ is itself an ‘unjust act’ (authority: not sure–this is somewhat controversial in ethical theory, but I will grant it here for the purposes of illustration)
The biblical God, therefore, committed an unjust act. (authority: substitution of terms)
Therefore, the biblical God CAN commit an unjust act. (authority: from the actual to the possible)
In general reply, we may note that simply stating outrage is not a sufficient form of argument. It is merely a substitute for true argument, with the intention to win over the prospective convert by means of emotional appeal. What must be done — but I have seldom seen done — is an analysis proving that a given action/directive by God was indeed unfair and/or cruel.
No doubt the reason I have never seen this done is that no critic has yet been informed enough about the social situation of the ANE to make such judgments. The tendency is simply to assume, “the punishment is undeserved, and can never be justified.”
Again as Miller tells us:
But notice the problem–the whole thing stands or falls on the accuracy of the personal moral intuition in Step 3. It there is no reason to believe it applies WITHOUT EXCEPTION, then our attempt at constructing a hard contradiction this way fails….This, of course, puts the ball back in the individual’s court to do one of two things: (1) show that these exceptions do NOT hold… or (2) show that although there ARE legitimate exceptions, there could not be any valid exceptions that would be operative in our biblical case.
But in any event, someone would still have much, much work to do, to be able to even offer the ‘it is a contradiction’ position as an argument. Without such work, this objection is simple assertion, unsubstantiated opinion (e.g, ‘hunch’?), or emotional statement.
In light of repeated use of this tactic by critics, it’s a good time to issue some advisories on what such an arguer truly needs to do to make their “argument by outrage” more than just an emotional appeal. This world is not their (the Biblical writers’) world; our thoughts are therefore not their thoughts; their values are therefore not our values. The critic tends to assume that people who lived in this day and age were “just like us” and would have reacted with the same immediate moral outrage as they did. That is simply not the case.
Mere statement of data on a broad level argues for nothing; a moral hierarchy must be examined and established. Take these two statements:
Hitler exterminated 6 million Jews.
Blethkorp exterminated 6 million Refrons.
We are rightly filled with moral outrage at the first one. But why? The obvious reason is that we know about Hitler and we know about his Master race schemes; we know about his attempt to seize power; we know from the data that he was morally wrong.
The core of “argument by outrage” is to take something like the second item, however, and shake out the “least common denominator” so that the moral equivalency is made to seem to be the same.
However, what if we start defining out the second one so that:
“Blekthorp” is the leader of the Harlanian race, a peaceful people who only wish to be left alone.
The “Refrons” are a predatory and parasitical race — say like Star Trek’s Borg — whose only goal is to assimilate others into their culture or destroy those they consider inferior.
Now that we have the context, whence is the “argument by outrage”? I have chosen a clearly extreme illustration, but between these extremes of black and white lie shades of gray which are a combination of black and white. We would suppose that any critic would agree that the Harlanians have a right to defend themselves. If the Refrons refuse to give up — are willing to fight to the last to achieve their goal — is it a moral outrage that the Harlanians exterminated 6 million of them? How indeed if the total population of Refrons was somewhere around 70 billion and executing 6 million was the only way to get the Refrons to decide that the cost of conquest was too high?
Lest anyone think this a fanciful idea, consider the key parallels to the arguments over whether or not to drop a nuclear bomb on Japan.”
@ Alvin:
“But notice the problem–the whole thing stands or falls on the accuracy of the personal moral intuition in Step 3. It there is no reason to believe it applies WITHOUT EXCEPTION, then our attempt at constructing a hard contradiction this way fails….This, of course, puts the ball back in the individual’s court to do one of two things: (1) show that these exceptions do NOT hold… or (2) show that although there ARE legitimate exceptions, there could not be any valid exceptions that would be operative in our biblical case.”
Well, I do hope when non-Christians use the same line of argument that you don’t criticise them or accuse them of dodging the issue.
Paul,
The snippet wasn’t my argument, it was taken from James Patrick Holding’s website referred to in the link.
I can’t help but wonder if you would post something like this if it was, say, the same story about a pro-life club or something. I guess we’ll never know.
@ Richard
Might i suggest that you scroll up to the top of the page and click on the “About” tab. Inspite of what you find there [or maybe because of it] MandM are very liberal about who and how comments are made.
There’s a difference between preaching bigotry and trying to tell people to live their lives by your primitive superstitions and doing charity. Maybe that’s why the media was surprised – that religious hypocrites actually hate atheists for doing charity.
Ben, actually naturalism predates Christianity by several hundred years so in fact it is your own views that are primitive which leave you open for the kinds of names like “bigot” or “superstitious” that you bandied about. Normally one refutes a position by offering reasons against it.
But I am interested, here you suggest that “religious hypocrites” hate atheists doing charity. Do you have any evidence that the people who tore your posters down were religious? And if you do, what evidence do you have for claiming they are hypocrites?