I’m a big fan of sex and relationship advice guru Dan Savage. When he had atheist blogger Jen McCreight, on his podcast, mainly to discuss the G-spot and female ejaculation, I thought it was kind of cool, but it didn’t really register as major. Later, though, I saw a post on Jen’s blog where she quotes some of the nasty feedback people left in the comments.

When I saw these, I wondered what on Earth had provoked it all, so I decided to re-listen to the part of the podcast where Jen was on, in case I had missed something. As best I can tell, all of the negative reaction was in response to Dan and Jen’s comments on a call from a woman whose boyfriend was going to participate in some naked Wiccan ritual (it starts at the 17:48 mark, if you want to listen to just that part of the podcast). Dan’s response to the question started off this way:

Dan: Every once in awhile I like to run a call like that just to remind people that it’s not just Christians who very deeply silly when it comes to sex and sexuality.

Jen: Yeah, I was actually thinking, it’s like you know, we’re giggling at this, but there are just as wacky things going on in different religions.

Dan: There are.

Dan then goes into answering the woman’s specific question, and uses the word “silly” a couple more times. As far as I can tell, that’s the main thing that offended people. Not calling religion stupid or evil or anything like that, just “silly.” Then they got into a more general discussion of religion, which was actually pretty interesting, yet fairly mild criticism-wise. Here’s a transcript of some of the more notable bits, both to give an idea of the tone and because it was a good discussion:

Dan: I was raised Catholic, very Catholic family, hyper Catholic family, and I, you know, walked away from my faith, in part because of my sexuality. It was like, what they’re saying to me about me isn’t true. And my response wasn’t go find a religion that doesn’t say that shit about me. My response was this religion stuff, soup to nuts, is bullshit, and [if I found another religion] that religion might not be saying anything disagreeable about me, but I can infer that they’re likely saying things that are just as untrue about other shit. And so I found so many people who, they get into conflict with the religion of their birth, and they just go find some other silly religion that works for them.

Jen: Yeah, people leave religion, or that particular religion, for a lot of different reasons, and some people leave it for skeptical reasons, where you look and you’re like “the idea that there’s some mythical being we have no proof for doesn’t make sense.” And other people leave religion because they don’t like what it’s saying about their sex life, so they just join something else that’s silly.

[snip]

Dan: My mom had a great expression, because, she would acknowledge that part of the problem with a lot of old world religions, thousand-year-plus religions, was their specificity, and they got busted for it, because they said things that weren’t true, like that the Sun revolves around the Earth. And then that was disproven. Like, “oh shit, we shouldn’t have been so goddamned specific!” And she found a lot of people in her life, her friends, gravitating towards vaguer shit, towards New Age hoo-ha. And she called that “disorganized religion.”

[snip]

Dan: You did a post awhile ago that I really loved where you called out women who were nonbelievers but were going through the motions of belief. Where you asked women who had walked away from faith what it took to peel them off, because women are much more religious, tend to the backbone of churches, and faith communities, and they’re underrepresented in skepticism/atheism land, which is part of what makes you unique.

Jen: Yeah, it’s getting much better in atheism land. But we do have to deal with the problem that women, especially in really conservative churches, all of their power in life is tied into that church, and a lot of them don’t have their own jobs, they’re seen as the spiritual head of the household, the only real things they’re allowed to do are Sunday school or potlucks. And it’s so much harder for them to escape, because if they leave they lose everything, they lose their family, their children, their friends, all their support network, and that’s why I think it’s so important for atheist women too to be outspoken, and that we have these communities, so people can leave more. But yeah, women have so much more to lose when they leave religion. So I don’t think it’s that women just are more inclined to be spiritual thinkers, it’s just that the social aspect of it is so much more important to them.

Again, it was an interesting discussion, and while I understand that some people aren’t going to agree with all of it, I have a hard time understanding how anyone could think any of it was beyond the pale. Are people really so thin-skinned that they can’t stand having something they do called “silly”? I mean, I’ve recently gotten really into watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Netflix, and I understand some people might find that silly, but I don’t care, because I’m not in middle school anymore.

Part of the problem, though, is that people have a tendency to hear mild criticism in the nastiest possible way:

Dear Dan: Please don’t have an atheist on your show to explain why those silly religious people are so darn stupid. There are plenty of intelligent people out there who also have religious beliefs. This show was just plain insulting.

Well no, they said “silly,” they didn’t say “stupid” or say that there are no intelligent religious people. But I suspect these sort of re-interpretations explain a lot of seeming thin-skinnedness and anti-atheist backlash.

One other thing: is there anyone out there who can claim not to find any religious beliefs silly? If you find at least some religious beliefs silly, it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for you to understand why some people find your religious beliefs silly. But maybe there are some people out there who don’t find any religious beliefs silly. Anyone want to step up?