3. My work is often perceived (I believe unfairly) as unpleasantly critical, angry, divisive, etc. T

I was recently interviewed onstage at George Washington University by Michelle Boorstein, a religion reporter for the Washington Post . The next day, Boorstein published an article summarizing our conversation, in which she excerpted a few quotations that made me appear somewhat sexist. I believe that these quotations are accurate, but they are also incomplete and misleading. Boorstein topshop shoes seemed to anticipate that they would spark a little controversy, and they have.
My exchange with Boorstein in the Lisner Auditorium had been somewhat prickly, in fact. At one point, she flatly denied that a significant percentage of Americans are fundamentalist Christians. I cited poll results going back 80 years that suggest the number hovers around 45 percent. Boorstein then asserted her authority as a journalist, having focused topshop shoes on these issues, studied all the relevant topshop shoes polls, topshop shoes and written multiple articles explaining them to the public. According topshop shoes to her, the kinds of questions I claimed had been asked and answered, and upon which I based my case Do you think God created humans in their present form? ( 46 percent ); Do you think Jesus will return to earth in the next 40 years? ( 41 percent ) hadn t been asked at all, and wouldn t indicate a person s actual beliefs even if they had. I found her remarks stunningly uninformed. I did my best not to let this derail the interview, but after we left the stage I told her that she had a professional responsibility to get her facts straight. She seems to have now paid me back in print.
I also asked Harris at the event why the vast majority of atheists and many of those who buy his books are male, a topic which has prompted some to raise questions of sexism in the atheist community. Harris answer was both silly and then provocative.
I think it may have to do with my person[al] slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people People just don t like to have their ideas criticized. topshop shoes There s something about that critical posture that is to some degree intrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women, he said. The atheist variable just has this it doesn t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.
It is a measure of the ridiculous paranoia engendered by political correctness that in the second it took me to make that joke about my sex appeal, I worried whether my assuming that most women are heterosexual would offend some number of lesbians in the audience. And though the phrase extra estrogen vibe, spoken in a tone that acknowledged its silliness, topshop shoes also got a laugh, Boorstein surely knew that setting it down in print would make me look stupid. (If further evidence of her intentions were needed, her announcement topshop shoes of the article on Twitter read: @samharris on why chicks don t dig atheism. ) It s very difficult to speak the way one writes, but this unpleasant topshop shoes encounter with direct quotation gives me further impetus to try. On the upside, however, one of my critics coined the hashtag topshop shoes #EstrogenVibe, and many have savaged me with it to delightful effect.
1. I started by claiming that my readership topshop shoes seems more male than female. And when I shifted to speaking about atheists as a group, I was referring to active atheists that is, the sort of people who go to atheist conferences, read atheist books, watch atheists debate topshop shoes pastors on YouTube, or otherwise rally around atheism as a political identity. I was not talking about everyone on Earth who doesn t believe in God.
2. Although I share the common perception that there is a gender imbalance among active atheists, I don t actually know whether this is the case. I used to joke that my average groupie was a 75-year-old topshop shoes man. Happily, my audiences are now filled with young people, but I still encounter many more men than women. I wouldn t be surprised if the split were 70/30. I would be very surprised if it were 50/50. Again, I am talking topshop shoes about active atheists. I have no idea whether there are more male unbelievers than female.
3. My work is often perceived (I believe unfairly) as unpleasantly critical, angry, divisive, etc. The work of other vocal atheists (male and female) has a similar reputation. I believe that in general, men are more attracted to this style of communication than women are. Which is not to say there aren t millions of acerbic topshop shoes women out there, and many for whom Hitchens at his most cutting was a favorite source of entertainment. But just as we can say that men are generally taller than women, without denying that some women are taller topshop shoes than most men, there are psychological differences between men and women which, considered in the aggregate , might explain why angry atheism attracts more of the former. Some of these differences are innate; topshop shoes some are surely the product of culture. Nothing in my remarks was meant to suggest that wo