Elenchus, I am extremely opposed to ALL racist/bigoted behaviour and ALL racist/bigoted politics, and have always been so. I'm SO extremely opposed to them that I've been perceived as a racist/bigot myself for trying to say (without much success because my communication skills are not good) that BEING A RACIST/BIGOT IS FAR FAR WORSE than merely being wrong about stuff.
I know I've gotten in this way in trouble in the past, once in SV and once in the SneerClub (as you illustrate), for trying to talk about the is-aught problem in regards to racism. Namely my position is to I call "racists", "bigoted", etc, only those evil/nasty/horrible people who exhibit racist/bigoted behaviour, racially/bigoted hateful attitudes, racist/bigoted prejudices or otherwise endorse/support racist politics -- but I do NOT call "racists" or "bigots" people who merely having wrongheaded ideas about genetics (not unless said ideas also translates to evil/racist/bigoted behaviours/attitudes/politics).
That's the is-aught problem.
I was about to say "All this is currently irrelevant to whether there's bias against atheism or bias in favour of religion here. You're just attempting to hurt my reputation (what little I have of it)" -- but yeah, I guess, I can see how it also relates to the atheism/religion question, because it's atheism that makes a clear distinction between the world that is and the world that aught to be (as atheism is a statement about just the fact that gods don't exist, and contains no moral precepts or injustictions), and it's religions that hopelessly muddle the two.
Oh. I understand. I'm sorry for misinterpreting you.
J/K I'm actually dishonestly pretending you're a racist just to slander you.
...More seriously, people can be racist and also wrong about race-related matters of fact. To be blunt here: if you learn that someone has a belief about something like "The IQ of black people is factually lower than average (although they on average of course have other traits where they're higher than the norm, like *crickets*)", are the chances that the person thinks "Black people are less moral than white people" or whatnot raised or lowered? Ignore the part in parentheses if it muddies the waters.
I mean, if you establish an objective measure of morality, like "amount of money given to charity" to give an example I most definitely pulled out of my hat just now...
The phrase "At these particular factors that are at-least-weakly correlated with morality, black people perform worse on average than white people" is a factual claim. Sure, there's very clearly other explanations for this, but you should still at least slightly raise your personal odds that black people are worse on average! And even if not, this is clearly still a factual claim about the world- that means it can be wrong, but being wrong about a fact that happens to touch on the mind-killer that is race isn't the same thing as being racist... And even if not that, it's not like you're standing in the election booth looking at their votes, and even if you were, you can't claim straight-up that they were voting for policies coincidentally associated with racists for racist reasons... and even if you could...
You get at least what the point I'm trying to make is, right?
(Also, for the whole "SV views on religion vs. atheism" topic, since you're basing this whole topic on your seeing certain other people's experiences... I figure it won't hurt to at least provide my experience, and you can pick what to note and what not to? I rather vividly recall going far beyond crossing the line while tossing shots at
@mesonoxian that were frankly godawful of me ["I don't think you understand how serious child abuse is"], and receiving way too many likes from the peanut gallery and apparently no reports to the mods over it. And if the mods don't react to godawful posters because they never get the opportunity to learn about them, then even if your claim is true and the mods are anti-atheism in mindset... the outcome is still indistinguishable from pro-atheism in practicality. And the userbase having a bend in your direction should definitely be more of a consideration than you're giving, since you'd expect a board with a heavy interest in scifi to be more welcoming toward transhumanity and rationalism, right?)
EDIT: g2g, i'll check back tomorrow if you want to talk over this, privately or otherwise
