Atheist Self

In the face of disaster

2007-08-22T11:34:00.000-06:00

Most atheists know, and loathe, the term "there are no atheists in foxholes." The theistic analysis is that when one is truly in the face of danger, the hate/mistrust/disdain that one has for religion such that they call themselves atheists loses its prevalence and the person becomes desparate enough to start praying/believing again. The atheistic analysis of the people making this theistic analysis is twofold: 1) they obviously don't understand true atheism, and 2) they have just accidentally explained that their own beliefs are due to a general feeling of desparation and lonliness. Fortunately many theists understand us better than that, but as with any demographic, there are those that are blinded by their own truthiness.

Recently, known atheist Richard Stallman was in Peru during a tragic earthquake. Stallman, known in some circles as simply rms, is a software developer and activist in the Free Software movement (pretty much the same as Open Source software, such that they are commonly combined in the acronym FOSS -- Free and Open Source Software). In fact, rms is considered the father of the movement, and remains one of its most influential characters. Simply put, he's a pretty big name among computer geeks like me. When it was discovered he survived the earthquake, he was asked to write about his experience.

The last paragraph is what caught my eye (enough that I paused my ongoing insane work schedule to write this!).

I read that a church collapsed on worshipers during mass; later I heard that the
priest had been rescued. Believers surely attributed the rescue to the good will
of a benevolent deity. They probably did not attribute the collapse to the ill
will of an evil deity, but it would be equally logical. In the 18th century, an
earthquake destroyed a cathedral in Lisbon, killing thousands of believers. Many
in Europe began to doubt religion as a result.

What a well-aimed shot at religion! These tragedies are typically accompanied by even doses of "Thank God we survived!" and "How mysterious are the ways of God!" that it's good to see a rational point.

But even more importatly, it was from a survivor of the event itself. One that did not suffer the foxhole-conversion predicted by so many theists.

Thank reason for that!

How do you explain...this?

2007-07-16T07:16:00.000-06:00

I'm a bit late jumping on this story, so I'm betting most of you have already heard about this. But it's just too... juicy. A door-to-door salesman in Florida was struck by lightning from a cloudless sky, nearly killing him. Paramedics found him not breathing, and without a pulse, but were able to revive him. Or at least, somewhat. The man is currently (as of about a week ago at least) in a coma and recovering. Hopefully he will make a full recovery, and finish raising money for his religious education, because I'm sure he's got some big questions right now.

Because, see, did I forget to mention? He was selling religious books at the time he was struck by lightning. Oh, the irony!

First, yes sometimes lightning does strike from cloudless skies. This isn't a divine miracle, but rather a natural event known as "positive lightning" that is understood scientifically. But if you believe in an active, personal God, then everything is caused by God, right? So what did this poor man do wrong? Was God afraid of him making it to divinity school?

But wait, he was revived. So even though God was able to kill him for a moment, human beings were able to pull him back to life. (Uh oh! Sounds like humans are getting too big for their britches, God's gonna have to do another Tower-of-Babel smack-down!) Not only that, but if they used defibrilators, then the paramedics were really fighting fire with fire. So God throws down his electricity to kill a man, and Man volleys back with their electricity to revive him. Sounds like we're out-divine-ing God's bolts from heaven.

The leader of the man's religious group is quoted as saying, "It's difficult what happened, you know, but what can we do? Things happen in life, but we still believe in God." That's a pretty level-headed response, I suppose their particular group doesn't believe in the "everyone's a sinner, we've all got one foot in hell and the other in purgatory!" point of view that my wife and I are observing so much here in southwest Virginia. Aside from that last phrase "but we still believe in God" that would be pretty much what I would say in such a position.

But it's that "but we still believe in God" that really caught my eye. I wish I knew the full context, because this was probably a response to a question by an interviewer. But it's still interesting that he jumps right to that. Because, I would think, a bolt-from-the-blue event would actually lead many people to even stronger convictions.

But then again, I could just be wrong. One of the larger churches in the next town over from mine was once struck by lightning and burned (not completely, but there was a significant fire). Nobody seemed to think there was a particular message there. I wonder what the opinion would have been if, say, lighting had struck down and burned a Walmart? Or one of those evil evolution-teaching schools? The story might have sounded a little different.

update: A brand new story to add a little perspective to the above -- "close to 2,700 lightning strikes were reported in Washington and Oregon on Friday and early Saturday, sparking 212 fires." All in all, I find it easy to understand how a more primitive society would be quick to make assumptions on the divine nature of lightning. In this case, it must be all those heathens in Washington!

A Gaming Religion, eh?

2007-07-11T08:11:00.000-06:00

I'm no hard core gamer, but I do enjoy video games and can appreciate hard core gamers. I guess that's why one of my favorite web comics is Ctrl+Alt+Del, which stars a couple of hard core gamers. Ethan is a somewhat delusional gamer with an active fantasy life and occasional moments of brilliance (for instance, he built a sentient robot out of an XBox). Lucas is much saner, and while still an avid gamer is more sensible and usually bails his best friend out of the troubles he lands in. It's a funny, well-drawn, and wrll-written comic.

Sometimes, though, two aspects of my life will juxtapose for a while. And for the last couple of weeks, CAD and atheism have done just that, with a storyline full of criticism of the ironies of religion. I'll spare you a dry synopsis of the comic and just give you the ticket right into the beginning of the sequence.

Round Up

2007-07-06T07:08:00.000-06:00

My schedule is finally getting back on track -- I might be able to go a night without working until 3 a.m. soon! It's been too long since I've posted though, so I want to do a round up of some good bits since my schedule has decimated my free time.

Religion, Politics, and the End of the World
A debate in four parts between Sam Harris and Chris Hedges. Unedited audio or edited video available here.

Creationism Bullsh!t
Atheist Perspective spotted the always-excellent Penn & Teller doing a Bullsh!t episode on Creationism. This pair is always worth watching and listening to!

The "Is God ... Great?" Debate
Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges, one on one. Zombie Time has a video and photo recap of the evening.

OK, let's be frank: Hitchens absolutely mopped the floor with Hedges. It was an embarrassment, really.

Hitchens tends to do that....

Anonymity: Shielf of the Atheist Blogger
vjack describes his struggle with anonymity -- one which I constantly reflect. The post got it's start with Hemant Mehta's criticism of anonymity. Which I also agree with. Hence my own struggle. Much of vjack's reasonings for maintaining anonymity are also my reasonings. In his #3 reason he states:

I believe that my ability to do my job would be jeopardized in many ways by professing my atheism. I would not be fired, but it would become much more difficult to do my job well. I would face increased alienation, a loss of credibility, greater hostility, etc. Because most of my co-workers and many more of my students are Southern Baptists who take their religion very seriously, I simply cannot expect that they would be tolerant of atheism.

This is my primary reason for anonymity -- except that since I work (more or less) as a freelancer, I have little faith (pun intented) that my clients would stick around. Some of my biggest clients are Nazarene. I consider it work politics.

Incidentally, why do you think it is that a large percentage of the atheist blogs that I read are written by teachers? I'm starting to feel left out....

The Sun Revolves Around the Earth
... or so 20% of Americans believe. This is a politically-minded post, but it says a lot about an atheist's position too.

For the democratic process to run properly it necessitates the voter to have some knowledge of what he is voting on. For it to work properly it requires voters to cast their votes based on an educated opinion.
...
There is a reason why people are fighting so hard to get creationism taught in the public schools along side evolution as a scientific alternative.Like I said, it hit me. And it hit me hard.Americans, on top of not having a clue what a cell is or what radiation is or even that the Earth revolves around the Sun are letting religious leaders dictate to them what to vote on issues that would take knowledge of basic scientific fundamentals, because I am assuming that they are assuming that since these religious leaders are supposedly moral and ethical “authorities” they should be qualified to figure out where we stand on these scientific issues, but who is to say that they even know these basic scientific concepts?

This speaks on many levels about how so many people are uneducated on what atheists even are, and why some people believe in creationism.

It's all about the easy answer. School tells them one thing. It's based on evidence. It makes you think. Some parts deal with math. Some even scarier parts deal with physics and chemistry and other sciences. There are a lot of unknowns. Then the church tells them another thing. It's simple and straightforward. You just have to believe a few things that are clearly stated. It's an absolute, too, if you have enough faith it will answer every single damn question you've got.

So if a person hasn't even been taught enough to know that the earth revolves around the sun, who do you think they're going to be more likely to believe? It's clear there is a bigger problem here, lying under the surface of religion.

WTF
Nice photo.

Bumper Stickers, Squirrels, and the NY Times

2007-06-26T11:42:00.000-06:00

I'm still trying to un-bury myself from the pile of work our move left me with, but there are a few things worth mentioning.

I saw an unfortunate bumper sticker the other day, on a car decorated with several dozen peace/love/etc. bumper stickers (on all sides). There are many really appalling bumper stickers, and I suppose as far as these things go it could have been a lot worse. What really stuck me about this one, though, was that the heart of the message was in the right place, it was just the reasoning that was flawed.

Don't take life too seriously. It's only temporary.

I agree with the concept of not taking life too seriously (emphasis on the 'too'). But calling life temporary implies, obviously, that there is something else beyond life that is the "real" life. Taken seriously or not, this denigrates the value, beauty, and preciousness of life.

While I don't think that life should be taken too seriously, I do not think it should be taken too cavalierly, either. This is it. This is your life. Don't waste it. It's all you've got! Do good things. Be remembered. Live on forever in the history books and in the memories of your friends and families. Don't be stupid. Don't do stupid things. Better yourself at every opportunity. But have fun while doing it.

Speaking of being a little too cavalier, here's a funny story. We have some new birdfeeders, put up recently after our move. I enjoy watching the birds while I work from my home office, and I keep a pair of binoculars and a bird guide on my desk. We've recently been having a squirrel problem, though -- specifically, he's climbing up and eating all of the bird food.

At first, all I had to do was bang on the glass of our patio-style door between the office and the front yard. Then I would have to open the door a tad and slam it shut. Then I would have to open the screen door. Then step outside and wave my arms. Then take a few steps towards the squirrel. He kept coming back. He finally got used to me trying to keep him away. He got bold.

Yesterday he was happily eating on the other side of the feeder, so all I could see was his tail hanging down. I walked outside. He peeked around the side of the bird feeder and took a look to make sure I was keeping my distance, but quickly resumed eating. I walk a few steps to one side so the bird feeder was more directly between us, and so that if he peeked around again I wouldn't be there anymore. Then I snuck towards the feeder.

I got close enough I could have grabbed his tail if I'd had gloves. I don't know if he really didn't hear me -- I was barefoot on grass -- or if he was just that bold. I guess he wasn't taking life seriously enough. He kept eating. I got my head really close to the bird feeder and peeked around and went "BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA!" I was eye to eye with him. Not four inches away. He did a little squirrel version of clutching his heart and peed a little in his fur. Ok, not really, but his eyes just about popped out as he was tripping over his tail trying to get away. Oh, it was brilliant.

He's learned his lesson, though. He is much more content with eating off of the ground now. Although he does occassionally get on the feeder again, he won't eat on the far side of the feeder anymore, and if I step outside he stops everything and doesn't lose eye contact with me until he runs off or I leave.

One quick link before I get back to work -- the NY Times has filled their science page up today with only evolution-related stories. Good on them!

Prayer as a Weapon

2007-06-19T09:04:00.000-06:00

In a recent post, vjack describes the act of schoolyard "prayer circles" and how they are used to attack non-fundie children.

The children start calling you names and hurling insults at you. If you happen to be Jewish, you will hear things that would make neo-Nazi's proud. You are a sinner. You are going to burn in a lake of fire. You will rot in hell. They form a circle around you, holding hands to make sure you can't easily escape. They tell you that the only way you can save yourself is to accept Jee-zuhs. They begin praying around you loudly to "save your soul."

I have never been a prayer circle victim, thank reason. My school was full of good ol' southern Baptists, but I doubt there were more than two or three really fundie families in the whole school.

Socially, what exactly are these prayer-circle attacks? Are they some kind of fundie-centric bullying? Some kind of misguided attempt at an intervention? I'm trying to figure out what the childrens' point is. Are they just trying to be mean? Are they trying to convert their target, as if to say, "Hey, all you have to do is say 'yes, I accept jesus' -- it doesn't matter if it's the truth or not -- and you can be mean to the next kid with us!" Does it matter?

Because deep down, all they are really doing is highlighting one of the great inconsistencies of religion -- specifically, of prayer. Theists, at least those that believe in an active, personal god, believe that if you pray to him/her, your prayers will be answered. They are quick to gloss over the 'unanswered' prayers, and point out the 'answered' ones, to maintain evidence that their god really has listened to them. In reality, the answered/unanswered ratio is exactly what you would expect from chance. If you pray for the sun to rise on time tomorrow morning, then your prayer will almost certainly be answered. If you pray for a second moon to appear in the sky tomorrow night, your prayer will almost certainly be ignored.

A good example of this, as noted in Dan Barker's wonderful song, "Nothing Fails Like Prayer," are those who pray for lottery winnings. If god answers prayers, and people pray to win the lottery, then why are the odds for winning the same as are predicted by statistics? A theist might reason that it is because everyone has prayed for their ticket to win, therefore everyone has equal odds for god to have chosen to answer their prayer. So why pray in the first place?

(I should also point out not everyone will have prayed to win, as there would be plenty of atheists and lazy theists with tickets. Prayer suggests a tendency for devout theists to win the lottery, but this is not the case.)

The use of prayer as a weapon in a good illustration of the paradox of conflicting prayers. Imagine two opponents, an attacker and a victim. Both religious. The attacker prays, "God, please help me smite this person!" and the victim prays, "God, save me from this person!" No matter the outcome, one prayer will be answered and one prayer won't be. The victim either gets away or he doesn't -- exactly what would happen without prayer.

So, again, what's the point? Emotionally, I believe it is similar to rooting for a sports team. As long as there are no bets going on, what do you gain from your team winning? You enjoy the victory vicariously, and get bragging rights over your friends and co-workers that rooted for the other team. Prayer offers exactly the same benefits. If your prayer is answered, you get a vicarious high from feeling "the touch of god" in your life. And you get to feel superior to non-believers and the un-saved. It is similar to people that keep rooting for a losing team, knowing that they're bound to win some day, people keep on praying, too, knowing that their prayer is bound to be "answered" some day.

I think this is why it is particularly satisfying for theists to bash non-theists. There is no conflicting prayer. It feels like a victory by default to them -- a sure win.

So, to answer my own question, I think it's just about the bullying. There is no attempt at conversion, because the goal has nothing to do with victim. Just like doing drugs isn't about what's best for the cocaine. The prayer circle attackers are using the victim to achieve an artificial high.

Biblical Truth, or a Propaganda Machine?

2007-06-09T09:17:00.000-06:00

Well, it's been a long time since my last post. When I am extremely busy with work, I have to gradually cut out other free-time activities bit by bit. This week was trying to prepare an interactive CDROM for a client in time for a trade show today (just barely made it) and it didn't leave time for much else! It also didn't leave much time for reading all of my blogs, so aside from a few minutes here and there I've just been completely out of the loop. I'm sure PZ has made 800 posts since last I read....

One interesting post I did catch was vjack's article on biblical literalists. A recent Gallup poll revealed that more than 30% of the US population takes the bible literally. I would have liked to have known what percentage of those people have actually read the bible.

Since our recent move, my wife has tried a different church every Sunday, looking for the right one for her and the kids. So far, no luck. "They're all sinners!" she says, referring to a recent sermon that preached how everyone is a bad person and we all have a lot to ask forgiveness for. It was basically a group baptist confession session. Yuck. My wife thought it was YUCK too. Theist or not, if you're smart you know that even if you know people have occassionally doing bad things, it does no good to sit down together and moan about it. What's the point?
You've got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don't mess with Mister In-Between

But what we thought was really horrifying was a service she told me about from a couple of weeks ago. (boy, it really has been a while since I've blogged) She described the children's sermon like this:

A women kneels down on the floor in the front, inviting all of the children to sit with her. When the children had assembled, she opened a newspaper. "Do you want to read the news?" she said. "Let's see what's happening. Do you want to her about all of the soldiers who were killed in the war?" The kids, confused, weren't sure whether to say yes or no. "How about this one -- a singer gets drunk, and crashes her car into a tree! Do you want to hear about that?" More confusion from the kids. It goes on for a little while, and finally ends with this gem, "Or how about this one -- a man rapes and kills his four-year-old daughter. How many of you are four?" She finally gets to her point, "This is all bad news, isn't it? That's why the bible is called The Good News."

And that was it. It sure is a good thing I wasn't there. I would have intervened long before the woman whipped out her punchline. That woman should be ashamed of herself.

Not to mention the hypocrisy! Has she even read the bible? The Old Testament? I'm still reading it myself, but off the top of my head:

every human and animal in the world, save for a few of each, is murdered by an angry and vindictive god
Noah gets drunk and naked, then curses his own lineage when one son sees him naked and has his kid tell him to get some clothes on
god toys around with Abraham, who was about to kill his only son at god's request
Lot protects two of his guests from the townsfolk, and offers his daughters as sex toys instead
Lot's daughters get Lot drunk and rape him
ten plagues, anyone? Despite the pharoah trying to let the Hebrews go seven times, god kept "hardening his heart" so he could do even more terrible things to the egyptians
Moses leads warriors into cities, and demanding that not only are the warriors killed, but also the elderly, the women, and the children
Joshua does the same, wiping out all of the men, women, and children of 31 cities
Someone is stoned to death for collecting firewood on a Sunday
Gideon kills a bunch of his friends because they guessed his riddle, then goes off on more killing rampages
One of Gideon's sons kills 68 of his brothers
Jephthah swears that if he wins a war, he will slaughter the first thing he sees at home as sacrifice -- which was his daughter
Another judge pulls a Lot and sends his concubine out to be ravaged by townsfolk, and when he finds her dead later he cuts her up into twelve pieces and sends them to the each part of the land

Gosh, sounds familiar! Soldiers killed in war? Check! People getting drunk and doing bad things? Check! Rape and murder? Check! (except in the bible it was the daughters that raped the father!) So how is the newspaper so bad compared to the bible?

Which brings me back to my question about the Gallup poll in vjack's article. Despite so many people believing the bible is the literal truth -- how many have actually read it? Here was a woman giving a sermon to other people, a position, one would assume, usually granted to people that are familiar with the material. Instead, it comes across more like war propaganda, especially when it is so obviously false.

Gloriously Huge Universe

2007-05-31T12:11:00.000-06:00

Several years ago I was debating the existance of God in an online forum. The debate was pointless, as my opponent was quick to draw arbitrary "micro-evolution, not macro-evolution" lines and resort to the inerrancy of the bible to 'prove' his point of view. He was a young-earther, too. Even though the debate stagnated after a while, there was one topic I had delivered, about which I was never able to extract a response. I posted one picture, and he put a full stop on all efforts he had been making in that direction. It was a nice moment for me. What was the topic, and what was my response?

As I stated, my opponent was a young-earther. I asked how, then, were we able to see light from stars millions of light years away? Did he not believe in the speed of light? No, he responded, the speed of light was fine. But the methods used to measure the distances to the stars were 'unreliable,' and that they were in fact much closer than we had been led to believe. This was when I struck.

Then how, I asked, do you explain the Hubble Deep Field image? I included a link to the hi-res image, and pointed out that, save for a few foreground stars, every glob of light in that image represented an entire galaxy of stars. And, if they were all within 6000 light years of us, how could the individual stars in these galaxies exist, considering they must be much smaller than a star needs to be in order to maintain nuclear fusion, and how would it have enough gravity to withstand being blown up by the nuclear energy?

This was what I couldn't get a response to. There is just something very compelling about a good visual.

The original Hubble Deep Field image (hires version here) was a snapstop of a tiny piece of the sky, like looking through a tiny keyhole. If you were to look up at the night sky, the little window this was taken from would be about the size of a dime -- held 75 feet away. And it showed more than 1,500 entire galaxies. What is really incredible is that the entire universe is like this, in all directions.

The image at the right is a more recent image, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image (breathtaking hires version here). This image was taken from a section of the sky about 1/10 the diameter of the moon, over an exposure lasting 1,000,000 seconds. It reveals more than 10,000 galaxies. Aside from the foreground stars, these are all entire galaxies with billions of stars each.

It should again be noted that this is typical throughout the sky. That means that, lurking behind the moon, is at least 1,000,000 entire galaxies. And the full moon only takes up about half of 1/1000th of 1% of the full sky (360 degrees, north and south hemisphere), or 1/200,000th of the sky. Which results in roughly 200,000,000,000 galaxies that would be, barring any obstruction, visible from the Hubble telescope at a similar acuity as the HUFD.

Folks, that's one big universe.

The next step is to try to picture how big a galaxy is. A new image from Hubble shows exactly that. It is the highest detailed image of galaxy M81 (Bode's Galaxy, about 12 million light years away, shown left) ever taken. Fabulous hires version here. Yes, every single little pinpoint of light is a star. In the center they are so dense and the galaxy is so thick that they cannot be distinguished from one another. I don't even have to calculate how many stars that is, you can just see for yourself. (I've heard that 150 billion stars is average for a galaxy)

Another neat demonstration of how big the universe is -- by showing how small we are, is here in a series of image. First, the earth compared to the other rocky planets (and Pluto). Then to the rest of the planets. Then to the sun. Then the sun is compared to other normal stars. And finally, to the very largest stars. Earth grows invisible very quickly.

I don't want to write a complete rehash of my last post on nature -- but doesn't it feel just wonderful seeing how big the universe is? How could anyone possibly believe they are "God's chosen people" after seeing how amazingly tiny we are?

Not in Kansas Anymore

2007-05-27T22:18:00.000-06:00

For years it seems like much of the news about Intelligent Design was coming out of Kansas, especially since ID was kicked out of Dover. This is probably because I lived in Kansas at the time, but I've heard it mocked so many times I believe it is safe to say that Kansas had a national, if not international, reputation for being ID-friendly. But now the winds of change have arrived, and Dorothy and her little dog Toto have been picked up and dropped into Kentucky. And as with the travelers to Oz, what they found there was quite a different reality.

Yep, Ken Ham and Answers in Genesis are opening the Creation Museum to the public today. Or, as I've also heard it called, the Fred and Wilma Flintstone Memorial Museum. PZ has collected a good selection of quotes from various newspapers about the opening. Zachary Lynn got a sneap peek and posted his photographs of the museum in a guided online tour that's interesting to look through, if only to see the Robo-Adam and Robo-Eve. (does anyone else think that Eve looks a bit like Alanis Morissette?)

We've probably all heard stories about the museum by now, like images of a Tyrannasaurus Rex grazing in a meadow and eating leafy greens and opening coconuts with six-inch razor sharp teeth, but now there are pictures in the flesh -- and when I say in the 'flesh' I'm talking about the two skinned and bloody goats in a diorama about sacrifice. And Cain standing woefully over the inert Abel, lying bloody on the ground with a bashed in head. I think these gory shock-value images are only peppered here and there to make the 'science' seem more adult and less elementary-school level. In the same way that a producer might insert a few especially brutal or graphic scenes in order to bump a movie into an 'R' rating. Also in the same way that teenagers think that ridiculous amounts of cursing will somehow make them seem more grown up.

Fortunately there is a four-page primer by Lawrence Krauss called "Top 10 Reasons Why the Universe, the Sun, Earth, and Life are NOT 6000 years old". Something I find interesting -- and sad -- is that old-earth people calmly gather facts, data, and arguments that easily blow the young-earth view out of the water. They let the facts choose the truth. But the young-earthers simply make up stories that suit their beliefs, and let the belief choose the truth. I've read Genesis, and there was nothing in there about dinosaurs eating coconuts.

Maybe religious people would be easier to debate with if they actually knew more about their own religion! Stephen Prothero has a book called "Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know -- and Doesn't" (A book that made my wish list on Amazon as soon as I heard about it.) Did you know that less than half of the people polled could identify Genesis as the first book in the bible? More than 10 percent think that Noah's wife as Joan of Arc. And evangelicals don't know a whole lot more about the bible than non-evangelicals. Right or wrong, spreading the word is the important part, eh?

I think that about sums of the Creation Museum, too. All $27 million dollars of it.

The Natural World

2007-05-24T20:03:00.000-06:00

The long and tiring move is over, and we are finally getting settled in to our new house. It is a log house on two acres with a terrific view right out of the big glass doors to my home office area. We've traded the sounds of traffic and sirens to birds and cows. Indeed, while I frequently listened to music while working, lately I've been keeping the music off and just enjoying the birdsong. When we are out driving, it is not traffic we are weaving around, it is mountains. I can look up at night and see more than twenty stars. Thousands, on clear nights. Our house, at night, actually gets dark! There are no street lights outside the window, just moonlight. In short, we are living in nature, and nature is spectacular.

So why ... ruin it by making up stories about a creator that fiddled around and whipped up the whole thing in six days? That makes it sound so trivial. So mundane. So ... disenchanting. My nature was the product of several billion years of refinement. It has matured, like a fine wine. It is mysterious and wonderful because I don't assume that it happened for a reason, or at the hand of a master designer. Because I don't assume that human beings have lived on this planet but for a fraction of a percent of its existance.

I love driving in rural areas, especially ones that are new to me. I frequently get urges (so far unmet, but one of these days...) to stop the car and run up a hill to an isolated spot. I want to sit down right there, and wonder if any other human being had ever sat down right there before, or was I the first? And to think of all of the animals that had been right there, and what kind of lives had they lived, and sights they had seen. To think of all the strange plants and creatures that had been right there, but have long been extinct. Wouldn't the concept of somebody actually creating that spot ruin that feeling? Wouldn't the unconscionable brevity of the creation story of existence minimize the wonder of the ages past?

We are not the product of evolution, of course. Evolution doesn't work like that -- there is no destination. But we are undeniably part of the same wonderous device that is evolution, and therefore part of the same wonderous machine that is our universe. In the vast set of equations that are silently being perfomed every time two people fall in love, or whenever the weakest antelope falls prey to the lion, or when baby sea turtles fight their way across the beach, or as the tree with the strongest roots survives the storm, or when a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo...we are part of the system. What is more, we are only particularly special because we are aware of the system, and we are slightly more influential in the system than most of the other creatures on this planet. Which is to say, completely ineffective on a solar scale, much less universal.

In the immortal Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Douglas Adams (an atheist, thanks to Richard Dawkins) envisioned that the perfect punishment was to be given awareness of how small and insignificant one really was in the universe. I don't believe this would effect many atheists. Myself, I rather like feeling that I am only a tiny part of the universe, because it means there is so much else out there to learn. But for many theists, this might indeed be the perfect torture. After all, theist mythology was born from a world that was very small, from the point of view of its inhabitants, and it hasn't developed as much as it might have since then.

But as humanity and human knowledge has grown, so has our awareness of the world. Believing that the universe was created by one being, let alone within a week, and that all of the animals on the planet could co-exist, much less fit, on a boat for more than a year, is shrinking the amazing universe we live in to an unappreciably small existance. Would the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel be nearly as awe inspiring if it was painted on the head of a pin? No.

The only way to truly appreciate the grandeur and splendour of the universe is by not taking it for granted. By explaining away our existence in just a few of pages in Genesis, we are making up answers to questions that deserve a lot more attention. A lot more ... reverence.

The importance of a face

2007-05-16T00:18:00.000-06:00

I've been extremely happy with the amount of atheistic video I've found online recently. In a recent post I commented on the very positive interview of Christopher Hitchens by Lou Dobbs, and YouTube now has another good Hitchens interview, with Anderson Cooper:

Another excellent Hitchens appearance is his debate with Al Sharpton. Sharpton and Hitchens are both wonderful speakers -- but it's interesting to me that Sharpton keeps modifying the definition of religion in order to support his points. His own view of religion might match exactly what he says, but he cannot claim that he represents all religion. It reminds me of the Kansas board of education that tried to redefine 'science' to allow for the teaching of ID.

Bligbi has also collected a good list of longer format videos, such as Dawkins' The Root of All Evil? and the recently viewed-in-america A Brief History of Disbelief. Thank you, Bligbi!

The importance of these videos cannot be understated. As I and other atheists frequently claim, misunderstanding is one of our greatest challenges. People are more likely to try to understand a person when they can see them face to face, rather than just read what they have written. It is easy to take a statement out of context, but not so easy in a video segment. The visual cues of a speakers face, inflection, gestures, etc. gives enough clues to get past trivial misunderstandings. A viewer can see the honesty, passion, and intelligence of a speaker. This opens the floodgates of empathy, and the easier for a viewer to understand the speaker by personally relating to individual statements. And through this, breaking down the misunderstandings that are causing atheists so much grief.

And finally, for a bit of fun:

You scored as Spiritual Atheist. Ah! Some of the coolest people in the world are Spiritual Atheists. Most of them weren't brought up in an organized religion and have very little baggage. They concentrate on making the world a better place and know that death is just another part of life. What comes after, comes after.

Spiritual Atheist

92%

Scientific Atheist

83%

Militant Atheist

50%

Apathetic Atheist

50%

Agnostic

33%

Angry Atheist

25%

Theist

17%

What kind of atheist are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

Travel, Talk, and Holes in the Dike

2007-05-11T22:56:00.000-06:00

Travel over the last couple of days has been lovely. None of us had ever seen the southwest, and we've been really enjoying ourselves -- despite the thermometer hitting 108 today. We drove from Kansas City, through Oklahoma, through the Texas panhandle, and into New Mexico on the first day. We stayed in a historic Route 66 motel and had a great time (other than my daughter doing a face-plant on the sidewalk, creating an unsightly set of scrapes and bruises on her face -- just in time for her flower-girl wedding photos!). The next day we finished the ride to Phoenix, and got to take a few side trips.

The first place we stopped at was the Petrified Forest national park and painted desert. We've also stopped at the Red Rocks state park in Sedona, AZ. Both places were well worth a little hike. We slung the kids on our backs and just had a great time. I sometimes feel guilty at how little of this fabulous planet I've seen. After this trip, I feel a bit better.

Another exciting advanced I've made on this trip is regarding religious discussion with my wife. The events I discussed in my last post were like the holes in the proverbial dike. I'm not letting the little Dutch boy stop it back up, though! I'm looking forward to seeing where this will lead.

My wife -- who nearly had enough world religion classes to have received a religion minor in college -- has a very spiritual approach to life. She's reading two books right now -- a [moderately] skeptical book on the existence of the afterlife and reincarnation (yay!), and a Sylvia Brown book (boo! -- but I would never discourage her from enjoying whatever she wants to, of course). And she is absolutely one of the most benign theists you can imagine. But she worries about my soul. She doesn't believe in hell, but she's concerned that when I die [and assuming there was a heaven] that I wouldn't accept it even in death.

This was a simple concern to alleviate, because my non-belief is based on lack of evidence, not rebellion or anger. I wondered how many rebellious or angry atheists she has known, to unknowingly consider me in that group? I think perhaps it is my use of the term 'atheist' instead of 'agnostic.' I think it is a good choice because, although I would accept incontrovertible evidence of god if I was given it, I find the odds of there being a supernatural deity so highly unlikely I feel that I am only an agnostic by slight technicality. On Dawkin's 7-point system, I am a strong 6.

Given this discussion, though, maybe the term 'atheist' is more misleading than I understood? Is it being read not as a belief, but as a position? From my perspective, this is something that I feel should be solved by educating those, like my wife, who do not understand that atheism is based on the principle of reason not denial. But how much weight should we give to our perspective in this matter? Shouldn't we be concerned about the perspective of the larger population? This is another time when I think a new term, like Bright, will do us all a lot of good. The biggest problem we face is misunderstanding. It doesn't have to be a fundamental misunderstanding like thinking that atheists worship the devil. It can sometimes be simply being unaware of where atheist stops and agnostic begins -- and where they overlap.

We also "talked shop" a bit, and discussed some more mundane topics. We discovered we both have a preference for the NSRV bible. I was able to recommend the ESV, and she was able to recommend the NIV. She helped clear up a few of the distinctions between different denominations that I'm still fuzzy on. It was a very productive talk, and although I felt fairly tense when we started I was considerably more comfortable by the end. I'm not sure how she felt about this -- but I am taking the fact that she initiated the most recent discussion (in a very conversation manner!) as a good sign.

Sometimes I feel a little silly for feeling like there is such a wall between us that talking about religion can be such a problem. But I've decided that it's mostly a matter of respect. We both respect each other's beliefs to the point that we are afraid of unintentionally hurting the other's feelings. I'm starting to learn more of her boundaries, and where I've inadvertently crossed them in the past. And I think she's starting to understand where I am on the atheism/agnosticism line. Progress all around.

Traveling, Coke Cans, and Sam Harris

2007-05-08T16:25:00.000-06:00

I will be posting when I can over the next two weeks, but it will be very irregular. We'll be travelling all over the country -- a wedding in Phoenix, and then moving to Virginia. I'm really very excited about seeing the west, this will be my first time out that far.

Unfortunately, all of this travelling means that I will most likely be missing the PBS airing of A Brief History of Disbelief. The series will be shown in Virginia before we get there, and in Kansas City after we leave! I hear it's on YouTube also, so that looks like how I will watch it. I will also be missing the televisation of the Comfort/Cameron vs. the Rational Response Squad debate! Augh! I have no doubt that will find it's way on YouTube quickly, too. Here's a preview already:

(there is some language in the 'intro' to the piece, so be warned if you're playing this without headphones in a work environment!)

In the meantime, I've found two write-ups so far of the debate, one from a theist perspective and one from an atheist perspective. They both pretty much agreed that while the Rational Response Squad didn't prove things one way or the other, the Way of the Master team was almost too embarrasing to watch. This from Becky Garrison's article:

Even though the atheists failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that God could not have been the spark that set all of creation, they seem to have nailed this debate when Cameron pulled out the get-out-of-hell card. Simply put, this was “what you believe about God will determine where you spend eternity.” At this point, if I wasn’t covering this event, I would have crawled out of the church in shame.

And this from OsakaGuy on the RichardDawkins.net board, who says Comfort sadly did not come onstage with a banana. Instead, he used a coke can to 'prove' that any design must have had a designer. Wait, that's the "scientific proof" he's been proclaiming? That just goes to show that Comfort has just as fuzzy a notion of what science really is as the Kansas board of education.

Who won the debate? I was under the impression that Ray and Kirk were not going to rely on their bible to prove their god exists scientifically. By that standard they both broke the rules by referring to the bible multiple times, and proved nothing with their argument from design, so they failed. If there were any rational fence sitters out there I would assume they must agree. As for the respective choirs on each side, I'm sure they both thought their side won completely.

I was worried when I first heard about this debate. I knew that Comfort and Cameron weren't smart enough to actually come up with something interesting, but I was worried about the way they would treat the Rational Response Squad. I remembered how Ellen Johnson couldn't get a word in edgewise here CNN appearance, and I was worried that a couple of smooth talking presenters would appear to have an upper hand in this format. I am completely unfamiliar with the RRS. Fortunately, it sounds like this worry was completely unfounded. Not only did the RRS hold up very well, but it sounds like it was moderated well, too.

If only we could get some more moderation on the web. A Load of Bright has stumbled on an out-of-context quote being attributed to Sam Harris:

In a another passage [Sam] Harris goes even further, and reaches a disturbing conclusion that “some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them”. This sounds like exactly the kind of argument put forward by those who ran the Inquisition.

Well, that's a horrible quote all right. Horribly out of context! Check out ALoB article for the full context!

Confrontation. What is my focus?

2007-05-06T17:10:00.000-06:00

My wife just unexpectedly breached our do-not-talk-of-religion taboo. Even though her phrasing was not conducive to dialog -- she was more interested in making a point -- I am very glad to see some discussion maybe starting to happen. It's certainly better than none.

I had just read an article on Afarensis disputing one anti-evolutionist's claim that:

All the hominid fossils we have wouldn't fill a single coffin.

Afarensis handily deals with this misconception, summarizing with:

The Catalogue of Fossil Hominids put out by the British Natural History Museum in 1976 listed over 3900 fossils. I've heard recent estimates in the 10,000 range. In short, DaveScot doesn't know what he is talking about.

I found this amusing and related the story and the summary to my wife. She took it in, and sighed over the original claim. And then she stopped, leaned a bit against the piano behind her, and said, "You know...." That's when it happened. The breach! It wasn't complimentary -- in fact, it was a complaint. But that's really beside the point. It was dialog. Just a bit. But there it was.

She told me that she didn't like how I was always complaining. That all I ever did while "learning to become an atheist" was focus on how stupid intelligent design people were. She admitted that yes, they were in fact stupid (she's a biology major and understands even more of evolution than I do), but she didn't like me talking about it all of the time. She equated it to her constantly talking about how stupid Muslims were, or Jews were for, say, not beliving in Jesus' divinity. "You wouldn't like it if I did that all the time, would you?"

I decided to ignore the "learning to become an atheist" phrasing, even though I found it very insulting on a visceral level that I might explore later. It was probably just a slip of the tongue, probably in lieu of "learning about being an atheist." I was more interested in her use of the word "focus." I started wondering what, exactly, my focus is. Did atheists as a group have a focus, or was there only the focus of each individual atheist? How could I even begin to explain myself if I hadn't determined this distinction yet?

I'm not sure how she took my silence as I contemplated this, but she gave me a few seconds, told me "Think about that," and walked off.

It was not the best dialog I could have hoped for, but as I said it was a breach in our religion taboo and any breach is welcome. Best of all, she left me with something to contemplate.

It wasn't what she had really intended me to contemplate, of course. Her seeming interpretation of my atheism as a series of complaints against anti-evolutionists is simply because evolution is our common ground, so those are the stories and statistics that I relate to her. Specifically, it has been things like the public acceptance of evolution statistics, or gripes about Ken Ham's creation museum. Her analogy is poor because she is comparing the dispute over the scientifically supported concept of evolution with a dispute over an untestable traditional belief. In essense, comparing a dispute over fact with a dispute over opinion.

This is like a math student complaining to an english major that is spreading incorrect answers to math problems. When the math student calls him on the issue, the english major defends himself by saying, "You wouldn't like it if I spent all my time saying how stupid it is to like math, would you?" The correctness of math problems, which can be right or wrong, should not be compared with a preference or interest. Using this kind of correlation in an argument would be a logical fallacy known as a non sequitur. (which translates to "it doesn't follow")

Another aspect to her complaint is that the stories I relate and the complaints I make are usually over individuals, and very rarely regarding entire social/cultural groups. The only time I make comments on groups is when referring to statistical findings -- also very different from disputing traditions. When referring to individuals, I only need to say the words "Fred Phelps" to show that I am not the only one between the two of us that makes complaints of a religious action or belief!

But as I said, it was the term "focus" that really got me thinking. Do atheists, as a group, have a focus? Can we? In contrast, I would assume that a theists' focus could be something like, "follow the wisdom or Jesus," or "save as many souls as possible," or "wipe out the infidels," or "spread Christian love," or even just "live a good life and get to heaven," etc. But since the only real definition of atheism is the lack of any god belief I find that there is a corresponding lack of any atheistically-defined focus. We have no doctrine, therefore we can never have a doctrine-defined-focus. Instead, rather like discovering your own unique meaning of life, individual atheists must determine their own focus. Some examples are Dawkins, who has clearly stated that he hopes The God Delusion will change some minds and reduce the evils stemming from religion. Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor put much of their effort into defending the separation of church and state. The list goes on. But what is my focus?

I would have to say that my primary focus, lately, has been to become as educated an atheist as I can become. This includes becoming versed in god/atheism and evolution/ID arguments, spotting logical fallacies, learning more about the bible, learning more about world religions, and so on. My goal for this is to be able to hold my own in any discussions or debates that may come up, so that my position will never look like a weak one. A secondary focus is to be part of the larger atheist community in order to fill a social gap in my life, to start and contribute to discussions and reflections in order to learn more about myself and other atheists, and to find friends.

What my wife has interpreted as my only focus is actually a side-effect of a distant, third focus. As an atheist and a Bright, I am also acutely interested in truth. The scientist inside of me cringes every time I hear of such ridiculous misconceptions as the 'hominid coffin' statement above. I feel the need to try and counter the spread of such misconceptions and lies with an attempt to spread the truth. If I spend any time complaining about them, it is only my inner scientist trying to bury the lies. It is a reflex -- a gag reflex -- to spit out any garbage that has infected my day.

What is my focus? Knowledge, friendship, and truth. What is yours?

Taking one for the team

2007-05-05T10:36:00.000-06:00

One of the biggest problems we face is misunderstanding. I can't even remember how many times in high school I had to clear up the fact that being an atheist does not mean that I worship the devil. I am particularly fond of reading of reading stories from atheists who deconverted from being very religious. One of my favorites is Primordial Blog, especially Brian's "What the Bible Really Says" posts, and his four part series on being an evangelical faith healer. Lynn's Daughter also has some excellent tips coming from a "recovering evangelical."

Hearing about the lives of Christians (and followers of other religions as well, I just don't hear from as many of them) is interesting, albeit sad, but I like to think I have a better understanding because of it. Hearing about these lives from the perspective of atheists that have deconverted is one method of gaining this perspective, but obviously one must also discuss things with real theists! The is a sisyphean task, though, because of the amount of material. Some people, though, have committed the time and energy to really "take one for the team" and delve into the theist psyche. Or... at least their message boards!

Lya at Escapee from the Meme Machine has done this very thing, and we should all benefit from it. She visited 35 boards over a two month period, and generated some very good data. Her entire post is a must read, but the sections covered are:

The 11 most common misconceptions about atheists
The 5 most common excuses for having no evidence of the existence of god
The 14 most commonly used fallacies
The 4 most commonly used bits of known hoaxes/forgeries
Some notable outcomes

The most interesting section for me was the 14 most commonly used fallacies. I have been trying to brush up on my logic skills here and there over the last few months, and am especially trying to learn the common fallacies. This is a great list of what to start with. What I was most surprised with were omissions -- the lack of the "atheists worship the devil" misconception that I've personally come across, and the lack of a misunderstood "piltdown man" reference in the most commonly used hoaxes. Of course that's more about evolution but evolution is always a popular topic for theist/atheist debates. (I saw a post from a theist just a few days ago that confused Lucy with the piltdown man, and claiming that Lucy had been determined to be a hoax, and that therefore evolution was false and creationism is true. Of course, anyone that even uses the piltdown man itself against evolution has fallen into a trap -- it was the application of our knowledge of evolution that brought the piltdown man hoax to light, making it a triumph for evolution, instead of a disgrace.)

Thank you Lya for taking the time to do this. I know this must have tried your patience, but you have helped us all.

Lou Dobbs and Christopher Hitchens

2007-05-04T23:31:00.000-06:00

I've never watched Lou Dobbs before, but after seeing this clip, I'll just have to give him a try. This almost redeems CNN of the Paula Zahn debacle, in my eyes.

Taking things entirely too far

2007-05-04T22:01:00.000-06:00

So.... did everyone celebrate the National Day of Reason? (cleverly held on the same day as the National Day of Prayer, you know) Others appeared to have celebrated the National Day of Being Stupid.

Remember the first "challenge" from the movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance? It involved Bruce Willis standing on the sidewalk in Harlem, wearing a sandwichboard with the phrase "I HATE N*****S" on it. It was like that.

An atheist in South Carolina got beat up and robbed outside of a gym for having another phrase written on his back windshield. Miraculously, it was 8pm before he was beat up. The phrase? "F*** the Skull of Jesus" Rebellious atheist, anyone? I'm really sorry the guy got beat up, and I respect his freedom of speech. But that doesn't mean there aren't some things that are best kept to yourselves. I was really glad to see how objective the cop's report was, though.

Virginia and Censorship

2007-05-03T11:42:00.000-06:00

It's official, we've signed on a house in Virginia, and will be moving around the 18th of this month -- very quickly! This is all taking place much faster than we had ever expected, but that's a good thing. I'm looking forward to the new house. Here is the view from the end of the driveway (which will be the view from the office as soon as we clear some trees from the end of the driveway).

I've recently speculated about the atheist population in that area, and by coincidence one of the stories I've read about recently is based at a high school around Roanoke, which is in the next county over from our new house.

Reed Braden innocently lends another atheist Dawkins' book The God Delusion. The friend's father, either not aware or not accepting of his son's atheism, finds the book and confiscates it. He calls Reed threateningly at 11PM, and later demanded from his principle that he be punished 'for "handing out literature" and attempting to convert his already-Atheist son to Atheism.'

Gideons were handing out bibles in the school parking lot a week earlier.

I contacted Reed directly about atheism in southwestern virginia. His report was about what I had expected. They're there, just not visible. Sounds like a good opportunity to start organizing!

Actually Talking

2007-04-29T22:17:00.000-06:00

This weekend I've been visiting my family as I've been house hunting in Virginia. We have found a house we really like, and I'm going to be making an offer tomorrow! The interesting fact? This house used to belong to a Church of the Brethren pastor. They used to hold some of their services and events in the basement. There is an old pew in the basement! How weird! It's a for-sale-by-owner, being sold by the daughter of said pastor (since deceased), and she had specifically kept it off of the listing services so that she could be picky about who buys the house. (we found out by word of mouth) Needless to say, I kept very quiet over being an atheist. This was one of those political closet doors that I didn't mind keeping shut. She sounded like she really wanted to sell us the house, so I would say it was worth it.

Yet, happily, I have really been able to talk about atheism on this trip! My sister, who used to claim agnosticism, turns out to have transitioned into full atheism over the last few years. I'm not certain about her husband, but I suspect he is too. My dad is agnostic, and my mom is pantheistic. We actually had a nice dinner conversation on the problems with religion, and took turns telling and laughing about awful bible stories (Lot's daughters, Jephthah, etc.). I was open to my Mom about writing a blog about atheism, the first person I've talked with about it.

When I was young, I caught an errant tennis ball in my eye. It scratched my cornea a bit and my doctor prescribed three days without opening my eyes to encourage the healing process. So I wore a tight blindfold, and listened to a few books on tape. After three days I ripped off the blindfold, bursting with newfound respect for blind people. I had taken vision for granted for most of my life, but was now truly appreciating it.

That is as close as I can describe the feelings I had while talking about atheism really openly, and in person for the first time since college. It was also the first time I had talked about atheism since striving to become a more educated atheist (familiar with statistics, familiar with more of the bible, familiar with more world religions, etc.). It was refreshing. It just felt great.

I had mentioned before about maybe looking for other atheist groups in the area. Greg and vjack had some good advice, but it is a very conservative area of Virginia so I'm not sure easy it would be to locate atheists. But ... if I did find some people, I would be very tempted to hold some of the groups meetings/events. In the basement. The very same basement that had at one time held church services. Wouldn't that be hilarious?

Posting, Houses, and Lots of Travel

2007-04-27T21:21:00.000-06:00

If you've noticed the glaring quiet from me over the last few days, then I apologize. I've been under a dreadful deadline at work -- not everyone can post like P.Z.!

My big news is that we've sold our house! I was going to say "finally" but truth is, it happened a lot faster than we had expected. We had prepared ourselves for several months of waiting after watching a house down the street sit lonely behind its sale sign for about five months. But we sold ours in 2.5 weeks. Not bad! Now for the exciting part, buying a house!

My posting will be fairly sporadic over the next few days as well, as I will be travelling and won't have much internet access. I'm flying out to Virginia early tomorrow, and will take a whirlwind tour through a half dozen houses before making an offer on one. It's a good thing there are some good options available! We'll all be Virginians by May 19th.

Does anyone have any experience with moving and locating atheist groups? We'll be in the southwestern area of Virginia, close to Roanoke and Blacksburg, so I won't have access to all of the nice Richmond and D.C. area groups. But it would be nice to find a few like-minded folks.

Drawing Lines: Good Lies and Bad Lies, Good Truth and Bad Truth

2007-04-25T12:41:00.000-06:00

Kirk Cameron is fond of cornering people and making them admit that they are liars, and therefore hellworthy sinners. Sounds like a fun guy at a party. That kind of polemical thinking -- you're either a liar or you're not -- makes it easy to make people feel guilty. But it's not that simple, of course. There are intentionally harmful lies, and there are innocent lies. There are compulsive liars and there are compassionate liars. I do think that honesty is the best policy, but I also think that if someone needs encouragement or hope, a lie might be the kindest thing you can say to them. In other words, there are lies ... and there are lies.

Without all evidence pointing against them, spreading tales of the supernatural is the same as spreading lies. And, like mundane day-to-day lies, ones that are spread about heaven and hell, God and the devil, and creation and ressurection, can be harmful or they can be beneficial. I've always viewed the afterlife as one of those encouraging lies that you tell other people to make them feel better during times of grief (just without the inevitable facing of reality that normally follows). There are plenty of harmful lies also, such as when evangelists guilt people into donating money, or trusting in faith-healing over a doctor's medicine.

Sometimes the same lie can be both to different people. The Secret, for instance, has a foolish, albeit encouraging message. Some people take that message as simple encouragement: if I think positively, I will find more that is positive in life. Others take the concept to harmful levels: if I think positively, I will be able to stop my chemo treatments.

My wife is firmly in the former camp in regards to The Secret. She listens to it, and it seems to help her cope during times of stress and anxiety, but she never takes it too far by relying on the 'power' of The Secret to make something happen. Today I witnessed the perfect example. We just sold our house (signed the paperwork this morning!) and are trying to finalize a loan on the new house for which we're about to make an offer. She is particularly vulnerable to financial stressors, and has been absolutely frantic all morning. She ended up going for a drive, listening to The Secret on audio CD. She called later and, sounding calmer than she had all day, admitted that she was feeling better and more in control.

I have never had a problem with this aspect of religion, in the same way that I have no problem with Santa Claus. If only religion and the supernatural would stay on this side of the line! If only there were a "Yes, Virginia, there is a God" in The Sun, describing the Einsteinian God of awe and amazement at the wonders of the natural world.

But there is a line, and too often the supernatural believers cross it into destructive and hateful results. These are the lies that Kirk Cameron and those like him should be fighting against. In the same way that Sam Harris reasons that the religious moderates unwillingly protect the religious fundamentalists from criticism, the harmless and compassionate lies that religion tells us helps protect the hateful lies from criticism. Atheists decry religion by pointing out discrimination and the obstruction of science, and theists defend religion by pointing to the ideals of afterlife and heaven.

Atheists are not blameless. Despite our desire to spread evidential truth instead of faith, our message can become just as horribly corrupt. Atheist Mama recently shared a story of two contrasting messages of atheism. She overheard one coworker describing atheism to another:

“you know [Kelly], there is no afterlife.” At this, my ears perked up. While I personally might try to not introduce rationalism with death, I’m always interested identifying fellow rationalists. He sounded like a good candidate. “There is no heaven, no hell, no god,” [Ira] continued. A fellow atheist too! I continued to listen, not even pretending to type anymore. “When you die, your body will rot and be eaten by maggots. Life really has no point.” Oh, I thought. He’s a maggot guy.

This dialog upsets the other coworker, who came to Atheist Mama for support:

“My mother raised me as a Catholic,” Kelly continued, “she’d just be so upset to hear something like that.” I nodded again. “Why would he believe something like that?” she asked.

I took a deep breath as I prepared to out myself. “Well, actually, I’m also an atheist. However, I think Ira’s being a bit of a nihilist.” I explained how the lack of an afterlife just makes life sweeter—since we only get to try once, we should do as much with our lives as possible. I explained that, while I didn’t believe there was a prescribed “meaning” of life, we make our own meaning through social compacts and personal values. “Oh,” Kelly said, blinking a few times as she absorbed this. Then she smiled, “That’s really so much nicer. I’m so glad I met you, Amanda,” and wandered off singing a random show-tune I’d never heard before.

It is not that Ira's description was false, it's just that it was an upsetting, harmful truth. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, right? Atheist Mama's words gained support, while Ira's forged opposition.

So, lets draw our lines, take sides, and make a deal. Theists, why don't you just stick to your "love thy neighbor" and "golden rule" ideas, and stay away from the fire and brimstone and hate and discrimination. And we atheists will stick to the fuller lives and personal values views, and stay away from the maggots.

Deal?

Appropriated Vocabulary

2007-04-23T14:54:00.000-06:00

One day, I will actually go to an atheist/humanist event; for now all I can do is read the recaps. The latest I-wish-I-had-gone event was the New Humanism conference at Harvard. I especially would have liked to have seen Salman Rushdie and Steven Pinker, and perhaps get a chance to say hi to Hemant Mehta. Hemant does have a recap on his site -- and links to another one by Rebecca over at Skepchick. This is the recap I want to discuss. Rebecca brings up a topic I feel very strongly about.

The only conference lowlight I’ll mention is one that may apply overall to the humanist movement, though I’m not sure: it was a disturbing trend of kowtowing to religion. As an example, there was a teleconference with a Southern Baptist convention, during which time Greg, the Humanist Chaplain of Harvard, referred to the planet Earth as “the Creation.” This was repeated in the conference pamphlet. The Creation? This came mere hours after one speaker criticized the way some people redefine “god” to mean “love” or “nature” — why use that language?

That's strike two for Greg Epstein in this regard, by my count. In a recent Associated Press article he was also quoted as using the term "atheist fundamentalists." Others -- albeit mostly in jest -- have referred to Darwin as our messiah, "On the Origin of Species" as our bible, Dawkins as a prophet, evolution as our doctrine, etc. Well, I don't find it very funny.

In many debates, using language that the opposing side is familiar with can be a good way to convey a point. Using their terminology can help relate similar concepts from your own point of view. But when the concepts are in direct opposition, appropriating the wrong vocabulary risks confusing the message. This is especially true with terms we have used to criticize our opponents, such as "fundamentalism."

One of my biggest gripes on this topic is the phrase "belief in evolution," as in, "Chuck doesn't believe in evolution!" There is a perfectly good definition for the word belief that is suitable here: "an opinion or conviction." But it should not be used here. The term "belief in evolution" is too often brought up as contrast to "belief in God," which uses 'belief' in a different way: "a religious tenet or tenets; religious creed or faith."

Yes, there are plenty of theists that are also convinced by evolution. But the theist / atheist conflict is too vocal, with too much misunderstanding and debate about scientific fact vs. theory, the validity of some evidence and the debunking of others, etc. Look at how theism and intelligent design have already tainted the understanding of such basic concepts, like what the word 'theory' means in science. We must avoid vocabularly that can be twisted and used against us.

Firebreathing or Soft-speaking?

2007-04-21T15:59:00.000-06:00

It only takes a few minutes with a TV Guide to understand that much of American entertainment revolves around extremist views, violence, and misfortune. From Glenn Beck, to Criminal Minds, to Montel Williams with Sylvia Browne, our entertainment ranges from what awful thing is currently happening, to what awful things might happen, to what awful things have happened to other people. One would think we'd be experts at handling bad situations. But we're not, and that is one of the things that makes us human.

Every now and then a real tragedy happens to real people, and it affects us on a national or even global scale. The Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine, 9/11, the D.C. snipers, the trapped West Virginia miners, and the recent shootings at Virginia Tech are a few American events in the last couple of decades that have stirred our collective hearts and welled our collective tears. Black, white, male, female, gay, straight, democrat, republican, rich, poor, religious, atheist -- our differences are obscured by grief.

Yet our melting pot of unity is marred by the slag of callous punditry and barbed blame from a few outspoken individuals. Perhaps these individuals are so mired in the machinery of public entertainment they have lost the ability to discern the national tragedies from the day-to-day news. Perhaps their heartless, shameless views are the very limits of their contribution to society, and they do not know how else to report on the events. Perhaps they are simply that: heartless. Whatever the reason, there are individuals that use times of tragedy to opportunistically inject hatred and discrimination into the vulnerable hearts of the nation.

In the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, we witnessed this unfortunate phenomenon again. Within hours of the massacre, Debbie Schlussel was already blaming the horrors on Muslim terrorists. Jack Thompson and Dr. Phil blamed video games within a similar time period. Ken Ham blamed it on atheism and teaching evolution. Dinesh D'Souza does not specifically blame atheists, but used the tragedy to claim -- without a single supporting fact -- that atheists were not taking part in the mourning, and were not emotionally concerned for the victims. Daylight Atheism has collected a few more examples from the likes of Rod Parsley, Rush Limbaugh, and Grady McMurtry.

What defense do we have? Atheists are feeling, loving, caring human beings. We were also deeply affected by this tragedy. But many of our most prominent voices -- Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, etc. -- have a reputation for passionate polemics. Not an appropriate tenor for these moments. I do not mean to suggest that these people would not be able to deliver a heartfelt defense, but they would need to overcome their existing reputation to be convincing.

As the entertainment industry demonstrates, the controversial, fire-breathing, extremist voices are the ones that America's attention-deficit public find most entertaining. The more extreme your view and the more controversy you can stir up, the longer you can stretch your fifteen minutes of fame. Who was the last person that became famous for just being nice? Fred Rogers?

Fortunately there are other ways to gain the public ear and still maintain an aura of kindness and goodwill, such as support for a sympathetic cause and philanthropy. Perhaps what we need to do is have outspoken atheists speak about - gasp! - other things. The public needs to understand that being an atheist is not all we are. I believe this is a misunderstanding that has left us particularly vulnerable to attack. But if the public is more aware of us as people, rather than atheists, they would be quicker to sympathize and slower to criticize and blame.

Poor Morality of the Bible vs. Tim and mobie

2007-04-20T21:48:00.000-06:00

Comments on one of vjack's latest posts, Christian Bible is Poor Basis of Morality, got pretty interesting. (The post itself is excellent as well!) The post is about 12 hours old, has 68 comments, and is still growing. One theist, Tim, started much of the theistic side of the debate, but others have chimed in, mobie in particular. I wanted to break down some of their comments in this post.

[Tim:] why then did/do science books teach so long that we had evidence of man evolving from apes with all of the models were proven false?

Tim and the evolutionists go back and forth on this one, with the evolutionists eventually deciding that he must be talking about the common misconception that humans evolved from apes, rather than humans and apes evolving from a common ancestor. Tim counters with a vague recollection of a complete ape-man skeleton that was proven false.

This sounds like a Piltdown Man reference to me. It wasn't a complete skeleton -- but it was a hoax. Its exposure did not invalidate any other evolutionary evidence, much like a magician's levitation trick would not invalidate Newton's theory of gravity.

[mobie:] From my standpoint the Bible is not at all contradictory, but even if it were, and even if it were void of real spiritual breath, you have to admit that it is an extraordinary book. Written in several languages over hundreds of years by multiple people, it manages to tell one cohesive story. I'm trying to think about a book in which Jane Austen, Voltaire, Assia Djebar, and vjack each wrote a chapter--would there be one story?

If they were all writing about the same topic (for instance, the history of a specific culture), and were all translated and edited by the same person or group of people, then yes. It would appear to be one story. The bible might be an extraordinary book, but it absolutely was not written as a single book, as was edited together from a larger collection of works by the Council of Nicaea. Also, I couldn't imagine anyone that's read it all calling it 'cohesive.'

[Tim:] If there were no God, there would be no person to question it.

So.... you're saying that God exists, because if he existed, then he created Man just like the bible says, therefore God exists. Despite being circuitous logic, it also falls victim to the "Many Gods" problem. The same statement could be made for Zeus, Odin, etc. So even if it was sound logic, it wouldn't necessarily apply to the God of Abraham. Tim doesn't even try to see possibilities without God. As he says later, "Faith does not allow me to think as such." But to continue....

[Tim:] If heaven and earth passed away and you were standing face to face with God, the Creator, would you repent and ask for forgiveness for not believing or curse Him to His face to spend an eternity in torment?

Tim is confusing the concepts of not believing in God with not liking God. I don't mean to say that there aren't atheists that also just don't like God, but they're not the same thing.

[mobie:] For every scientist who backs evolution, there is another who disproves it.

Ugh. What a misconception. The Intelligent Design movement proudly hawks a list of 700 scientists that don't believe in evolution. Does mobie really think there are only 1,400 scientists in the world? To prove mobie wrong, the NCSE has Project Steve, a list of scientists that affirm evolution. The catch is that only people named Steve (or a derivative) can be on the list -- therefore representing only about 1% of scientists. The list is about 800 members strong now. More scientists than ID has -- and they're all Steves!

I'm going to have to pay more attention to vjack's comments, I hadn't noticed all of this fodder before.

Atheism and Strength of Character

2007-04-19T20:19:00.000-06:00

Although my parents did take me to a Unitarian church every few weeks (for social and educational reasons, I assume) until I was eight or nine, a God belief was never demanded of me, and I never grew one. This makes me one of the lucky ones, because I never faced any conflict at home about my atheism. My mother wanted to make sure I had made an educated choice, and we had a friendly discussion once about it, but other than that is never came up.

It doesn't come up now, either, but for slightly different reasons. My wife is accepting of my atheism, even though she doesn't share it. So we rarely bring up our religion. But during the few times we have discussed it, I have leared that she has two main problems with atheism.

First, she thinks it would be very sad to believe that death really is the end, and that there is nothing afterwards. I can't fault her for that, death is very sad. Although, I think that seeing death as non-final is disrespectful to those that have died. If a firefighter dies saving someone's life, they have given the greatest sacrifice. If you think that the firefighter has merely moved on to a better place, how could you fully appreciate the selflessness of their action?

She also wonders how we can handle difficult situations without getting strength from God. This is the one that bothers me. With no God watching my back, I had the chance to develop my own strength. Being an atheist has made me a stronger, less dependent person. In this regard, I have often thought of religion as a crutch. As Jon Nelson says,

The atheist is, or should be, a person with self-confidence and the ability to think freely, without the crutch of religious superstition.

Madelyn Murray O'Hair writes:

We solve our problems ourselves or they are not going to get solved, and you know it and I know it. .... An atheist accepts that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue it, and to enjoy it.

Dan Harlow, in a post titled You Are Better Than Any God, relates a touching story of his mother and one of her friends. He observes:

Now I’m not saying that Christians (or any other faith) are babies who can’t run their own lives but I do feel that by giving yourself up to a “higher power” you loose faith in yourself and allow others to take advantage of you because you think it’s God’s plan to do so. A person should believe in themselves, own up to their actions and have the courage to run their own lives.

Without God actually existing, the strength people find from him is a placebo effect anyway. It makes me sad that there are people unwilling to recognize their own strength of character, and instead attribute their strengths to God.

They're not giving themselves enough credit. People are better than that.

Return to Pascal's Wager

2007-04-18T22:15:00.000-06:00

Rick Warren, in a recent Newsweek covered debate with Sam Harris, sums up his argument with Pascal's Wager:

We're both betting. He's betting his life that he's right. I'm betting my life that Jesus was not a liar. When we die, if he's right, I've lost nothing. If I'm right, he's lost everything. I'm not willing to make that gamble.

Harris himself, in a recent article, goes into many good reasons why you shouldn't give any mind to Pascal's Wager. To quickly sum up his points: 1) it falsely assumes that a life would be led the same way as an atheist or as a believer, 2) it could be applied to any belief system and therefore conflicts with itself, and 3) it assumes that a person can rationally decide what to believe in.

I came across Pascal's Wager when I was seven or eight. I grasped Harris' third point right away. I couldn't understand how a supposedly omnipotent God could be tricked by someone choosing to believe in him for selfish reasons.

Later, I also decided that any God that was only interested in whether or not you believed in Jesus, and not whether or not you led a good life and were respectful, honest, and nice to others, was not a God I wanted to associate with anyway. I think that Christians are so thoroughly steeped in this thinking, that they don't understand how breathtakingly arrogant their God looks like from an outside point of view. It's a divine version of, "Well, that's enough talking about me! Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"

The biggest problem, though, is that it's just a wager! It has absolutely zero bearing on the truth, so I don't understand why it keeps coming up in debates. It's like saying that making a safer bet (lower odds) in a Casino will encourage the dice to roll in your favor.

Or, let's translate it into something more mundane. Say you are trying to decide whether to cross the street or not. You reason that there could be a car coming at exactly the right moment so that if you stepped into the road it would hit you. Or there might not be, and you might get to cross the road safely.

Pascal's Wager would say that if you believed there was a car, and there wasn't one, it wouldn't matter, you were safe either way. But that if you didn't believe in the car, and there was one, you were dead and lose the wager.

What this example and Pascal's Wager have in common is that neither one takes into account the ability to observe the situation and determine the actual odds. You're not stumped by a Street Crossing Wager every time you're at an intersection, you can observe the traffic and determine if it is safe to cross. Pascal's Wager and the existence of God are the same way. We can observe the complete lack of evidence of God and the success of alternate explainations, and realize that the probability of a God existing is vanishingly small.

Atheists do not play dice with the universe.

In Times of Crisis

2007-04-17T22:09:00.000-06:00

You'd have to be living under one hell of a large rock if you haven't heard about the Virginia Tech shooting lately, so I'll just avoid discussing any details. If you want more, pick your favorite news source and it's currently on the front page. Or you can visit the Wikipedia page, where they have titled the incident the Virginia Tech Massacre.

Tech is around where I grew up. I interned briefly with a professor there during high school, as did my wife. I also spent plenty of time in the research library. Virginia Tech is my father-in-law's alma mater, and is where my mother-in-law is currently working. My wife and my sister each have several friends that currently attend, and I've known several people that graduated from there. Also, I'm only three degrees away from one of the victims. One of my best friends from high school, his friend's best friend was one of the first two victims in the dorm. I know that sounds silly and remote, but it's made a real impact on me. Hearing about this makes me incredibly sad. Not just from the pointless loss of life and unnecessary misery, but from actually having a frame of reference -- something I didn't have with, say, 9/11 or Columbine.

The interesting story here is from my mother-in-law. Their part of Virginia had three inches of snow the night before the shooting, very unusual for this time of year. They lost electricity (they live in an extremely rural area and losing power during a snowstorm isn't very unusual), and a tree fell over their driveway, right outside the garage. They had to get neighbors to come over and help them just so they could leave the house. By the time they got everything cleared out, the shooting was over and they were sending everybody home. My mother-in-law never even got to campus that morning. Of course, she works in the administrative office and would not have been in any danger, but we're all happy that she avoided the whole mess, and had several concerned inquiries about her wellbeing from friends and other family members that day.

Anyway, I was relating this story to a client earlier today. As an atheist, I'm still solidly "in the closet" when it comes to my clients, for political reasons. (Most of my clients are very religious, and many of them operate religion oriented businesses -- like a Christian tree nursery, no kidding!) After hearing about the tree barricading my mother-in-law from work, my client whispers, "It's a miracle!" I'd been expecting this, but still had difficulty holding my tongue. Aside from all of the points I could make about it hardly being a localized snowstorm, and it certainly was not the only tree down, and that having a power outtage is rather unfortunate -- what I take real issue with is this being labelled a miracle.

What I would have said, had this been an indifferent acquaintance, would have been, "It doesn't sound like much of a miracle -- 33 people are dead!" That some theists will praise their own well being, or the well being of specific others, in the face of suffering is one of my biggest pet peeves. Although I must make this very clear, I don't think people realize how callous they are acting when they say these things. I think it is a kind of knee-jerk reaction. I have a little theory on this.

The bible, obviously, is very one-sided. I can't stress how insanely one-sided it is. No tears are shed for the dead first-born of Egypt. When Joshua goes around killing all of the men, women, and children from 31 good-sized cities, there is not a single word said on behalf of the innocent victims. The polarity of these stories is absolute. There are the good guys, and there are the bad guys. Everything is a God/Devil mirror. The 'historic' miracles that Christians are indoctrinated with are all black and white. Only the good guys get the miracles. Only the bad guys suffer.

Theists are taught to look for miracles in real life, but unlike the examples they have learned from, real life is not polemical. This leads to failure to acknowledge the other side of events. I don't believe for a moment that theists couldn't see the other side if they tried. It's just that they were never encouraged to see the other side.

There are also those that purposefully ignore the plight of the sufferers. I'm talking about those like the Westboro Baptist Church, who plan on picketing the funerals of the Tech victims. These theists, I believe, take the scriptural reference miracles way too seriously. They attribute the same 'crimes' of, say, the firstborn of Egypt, or the Midianite women, to those that suffer in the face of events they consider modern day miracles (or, to look at it from the other side, those that suffer punishments). The suffering is caused by sin, or the devil.

We should be proud, as atheists, to have such clarity of thought that victims are not clouded from our point of view. It is sad enough that so many lives are wasted because people believe a better one is coming, but to know that many live their lives through the foggy lens of indoctrination is truly heartbreaking.

Is Atheiphobic a Word?

2007-04-17T11:09:00.000-06:00

My library is expanding nicely! My copy of I Sold my Soul on eBay came in today, so I'll get to that as soon as I finish The God Delusion. I've also recently purchased The Varieties of Scientific Experience and found Breaking the Spell last night in a half-price bookstore.

Other's aren't quite so appreciative of all of this reading material. Don Feder, author of Who's Afraid of the Religious Right, has a new article published in USA Today, called Atheism isn't the final word. I'm going to desconstruct this a little, directed at Don:

Oh, for the days when one could safely stroll into a bookstore without tripping over the latest atheist title.

Aren't book stock and bestseller lists based on demand, not supply? You should direct this criticism to the patrons that are actually buying these titles.

Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., has become the first member of Congress to announce that he doesn't believe in God. He's probably just looking for a book deal.

Can you say "petty?" Also, irrelevant. Stark's statement has nothing to do with atheist advocacy. He wasn't advocating anything.

Why the sudden outpouring of atheist advocacy? Perhaps it's a way for the cultural left to assert itself in the face of the religious right.

You put this directly after the Pete Stark announcement. How does one non-religious person in over 500 lead to a cultural assertion? How many Christian books come out every year? How much funding do Christian organizations have compared to atheist ones? According to polls, half of Americans don't even know a single atheist. We're just wanting to be heard.

Let the godless write their books and the faithful answer them. The disillusionment with religion that dominated British intellectual circles after World War I helped to shape the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis.

And today, Britain is around 40% non-believers. C.S. Lewis was a good author, but hardly an indicator of trends.

In the USA - the most science-oriented society in history - Christian bookstores, radio stations and TV programming proliferate.

We're maybe (arguably) the most science-dependent, but science-oriented? Give me a break. Nearly 30% of the US thinks the sun goes around the earth. Just because we use computers doesn't mean we know how to program them. Just because we happily use the products of science doesn't mean most people know a lick about it.

Also, we're back to demand again. The proliferation of Christian media is mostly reflective of the statistical weight Christians have among book readers, radio listeners, and TV watchers. It has nothing to do with science in society.

I thought you said that bookstores were crowded with atheist books, anyway?

It seems as though a hunger for the Creator is imprinted on the human heart.

No, that would be DNA. You know, that molecule you believe in when it's used to zealously convict a criminal to death row, but that you don't believe in when it shows the evolutionary similarities between humans and apes.

What would a world without God look like? Well, for one, morality becomes, if not impossible, exceedingly difficult.

What about morality that isn't expressed in the bible? I don't think the bible has anything to say about doctor/patient priviledge, yet I've never met a doctor that didn't think it was immoral to discuss other patients with you. What about owning slaves? Oh, wait, that's endorsed by the bible! Yep, there's no way humans could ever learn morality on their own....

"Thou shalt not kill" loses much of its force when reduced from commandment to a suggestion.

If the only thing keeping you from killing people are a few verses from a book many thousands of years old, then remind me to avoid meeting you in a dark alley. It's a lot easier to forget a few old verses than it is to ignore the common sense, decency, social responsibility, and respect for other human beings that I and every other atheist I've ever met possess.

A universe that isn't God-centered becomes ego-centered.

I guess if your ego is big enough to believe that a creator of the Universe personally loves you and pays attention to you and listens to your prayers, then you already think you're at the center of the universe. It also means that your universe if very, very small.

People come to see choices through the prism of self: what promotes the individual's well-being and happiness. Such a worldview does not naturally lead to benevolence or self-sacrifice.

Have you never heard of "if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours?" What about "two heads are better than one?" There are many benefits to being concerned about others and happily cooperating with others. This is not just seen in humans. Females of many species help take care of other female's babies, despite not directly promoting their own well-being and happiness. Chimpanzees have been seen sacrificing their own life by jumping into a moat to try to save a fellow chimp, despite not being able to swim. An experiment with monkeys shows that when food was only available after pushing a button that delivers a painful electrical shock to another monkey, they would starve for days to avoid hurting the other monkey.

An affirmation of God can lead to the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the Declaration of Independence.

Wasn't the Declaration of Independence written to free a people that had escaped from religious oppression?

In terms of morality, a denial of God leads nowhere.

What about the Constitution?

There are no secularist counterparts to Pope John Paul II, Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce (the evangelical responsible for abolition of the British slave trade), Martin Luther King Jr., or the Christians - from France to Poland - who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

Daniel Morgan already pointed out that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have given $30 billion to charity. I would also like to add Elisabeth Cady Stanton, a leading figure in the women's rights movement.

Yet, the worst horrors of the modern era were perpetrated by godless political creeds.

This doesn't mean that the horrors were done in the name of atheism. The horrors from religion was done in the name of religion.

There is no irrefutable evidence for God's existence or non-existence. But, if you look closely, his footprints can be discerned in the sands of time.

You're making the claim, you back it up. We don't have to prove God's non-existence just like we don't have to prove Odin's non-existence, or Vaisnavi's.

Jews introduced the world to monotheism. They also were the first people to perceive history as linear- an unfolding story moving toward a conclusion. Is it a coincidence that this tiny, originally nomadic people generated the ideas that shaped the Western world, including equality, human rights and a responsibility to our fellow man?

Let's see how they did. Equality: by allowing slavery? Human rights: by permitting you to sell your daughter? Or by stoning your wife if she said she was a virgin when you married, wasn't, and it bothered you? Responsibility to our fellow man: by mauling other people's children because they called you bald? Or by killing people that collect firewood on Sunday?

Atheists are free to disbelieve and to try to propagate their disbelief in books and other intellectual forums. But saying the debate is over doesn't make it so. A bit of humility might make their case more convincing. Then again, humility is itself a religious concept.

The religious concept is to waste humility before something invisible, untouchable, and untestable, and then be righteous and demanding of special priveledge to the detriment of people they consider less deserving. I admit, don't share that type of humility.

Pope Sends Bear to Children

2007-04-16T16:12:00.000-06:00

An article from Reuters tells that an unidentified Italian sends Pope Benedict a huge stuffed toy bear as a birthday present. The Pope remarked that it was a "beautiful specimen" and sent it on to Rome's Bambino Gesu (Baby Jesus) children's hospital.

Where it came to life and mauled 42 children!!

Ok, just kidding. I couldn't resist.

Atheism is Just One Aspect, is Christianity?

2007-04-16T11:00:00.000-06:00

For all that I talk about and identify with atheism, it is just one aspect of a larger set of my beliefs and ethics. The same can be said for most, if not all, of the atheists that I've met or read their blogs/articles/books. However the larger set is labeled it must, by definition, come before atheism in our personal taxonomy of beliefs. For instance, atheism does not describe the fact that I don't believe in fairies, mummy's curses, or The Secret. Yet my disbelief of these things, as with my disbelief in any divine being, are all aspects of the same set of beliefs/disbeliefs.

The label that I prefer for this larger set is Bright. As defined on the Bright's website:

What is a bright?

A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

What I like about the term Bright in particular is that it is also a movement, so it is also speaks about a desire and a goal. You can read more about the Brights' reason and purpose on their webpage. With this definition, atheism is clearly a subset of beliefs, stemming from a worldview that is free of the supernatural.

vjack has recently examined the topic, declaring Secular Humanist First, Atheist Second in a well thought out post. I had just one quibble:

If you ask me why I am an atheist, the core of any response I will give you is that my application of reason and science gives me no reason whatsoever to accept the theistic belief claim (i.e., that any sort of god or gods exist). But why do I believe that reason and science are valid ways of acquiring knowledge while blind faith is not? This takes us to secular humanism.

I don't think you can compare faith and reason as methods of acquiring knowledge on even ground, regardless of anyone's beliefs. The difference is that faith cannot acquire knowledge from new data, while reason and science can. Faith can gain new insights from analysis of existing information, or can gain tangential historical information from archaeological discoveries, but they can't create circumstances that can generate new data -- what science does with experimentation. There are new discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls that are clearly not tangential, but these are still pre-recorded information. They have simply been rediscovered.

Science also gains information from continued analysis of old data, and from archaeological discoveries (as well as paleontological, geological, and astronomical glimpses into the past). But it also creates new knowledge and new data that can lead to whole new fields of study -- think of all of the new science like nanotechnology and quantum chromodynamics that weren't around 100 years ago.

This leads me back to the concept of atheism being just one aspect of a larger set of beliefs. Can the same be said of Christianity? No, for the most part I don't think it can. (I will limit my discussion here to Christianity because I am not familiar with enough religions to categorically make this claim.) For all of the fuss that Christian fundamentalists make over how their moral guidelines are taken straight from the bible, this should be obvious. This is also revealed in the points I just made about the acquirement of new knowledge.

Because Christianity is limitated to existing material, and can not acquire new data, modern Christianity is a closed system. (I specify 'modern' Christianity because early Christianity was rife with religious imports, and it borrowed material from other religions during its period of establishment.) Therefore, it must, according to its own tenets, have generated its ethics and the structure of its beliefs internally. Anything else, and they are on the slipperly slope of admitting that their religion was created by man.

But what about ethics and beliefs outside of Christianity, like dragons, leprechauns, and Sylvia Brown? Obviously the bible has nothing specific to say about Sylvia Brown, although the fact that she's a Christian seems to be enough to convince people that she falls within the realm of Christian beliefs. The bible does mention dragons, although it's more a subject of translation. That doesn't stop some people from saying that when the bible mentions dragons it is referring to dinosaurs, that St. George's Dragon was a dinosaur, etc.

What about leprechauns, fairies, the loch ness monster, and other myths and fables? Doesn't belief in a supernatural deity automatically license the possibility of other supernatural claims? I don't think that believing in God means that you automatically believe in zombies (except for Jesus and all of those other prophets that rose out of the grave when Jesus did), but believing in one supernatural thing makes it easy to believe in others. In this aspect the specifics do come down to personal belief -- which is backed up, post hoc style, by the established existence of the supernatural. In this way, Christianity does not declare these to be truths, but allows them.

Atheist Day!?

2007-04-14T21:23:00.000-06:00

A NoGodBlog post from a couple of days ago (4/13) mentioned that it was Atheist Day! I had no idea there was one (that wasn't a joke). I can't find much information about it, but the post indicates that it is due to it being Madelyn Murray O'Hair's and Thomas Jefferson's birthday. Ok, so that's a neat concept -- Thomas Jefferson is one of my favorite atheists people that don't believe in a personal God. I'll try to remember this one next year.

Some theists call April 1st National Atheist's Day. Get it? It's a pun on April Fool's day and the biblical version "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." (Psalm 14:1)

There is also the National Day of Reason, the 1st Thurs. in May every year. That is one I will definitely be celebrating this year! It's meant to coincide with the National Day of Prayer. And if any theists get the idea that it's not respectful to land our day right on top of their, just remind them that they landed Easter right on top of Eostre, and Christmas almost right on top of Winter Solstice.

I think having a National Day of Reason is good, but I would like to see a little more connection being made between the day and the atheists behind it. If nobody understands that reason=atheism, then the publicity of having a holiday for us isn't really going to do any good.

A split in the atheist community? A false and harmful concept.

2007-04-13T21:24:00.000-06:00

(this began as a comment to a vjack post at Atheist Revolution)

A recent Associated Press article, Atheists Split Over Message, discusses a perceived split in the atheist community. Not in their convictions and rejection of religious belief and dogma, mind you, but merely in how strongly they advocate it. It's unrelated to atheism. It's like saying that there is a split among math students because some of them are more interested in doing problems on the blackboard than others. The so-called split is not actually relevant to math. It is regarding a tangential quality.

This kind of publicity is potentially harmful. Any group that has had as much trouble getting organized as we are having does not needs headlines like Atheists Split being thrown about.

First off, it's a distraction. We're all atheists, and how much we want to promote atheism or how opposed we are to theism doesn't change this. Creating the illusion of some kind of non-religious Great Schism could in fact be harmful for all of us, as it weakens the conviction of our position in the minds of outsiders. "Why should we listen to them, they can't even decide what they think amongst themselves!" In our math class example, the reputation of the class might weaken if rumor of a split among the students hinted at the possibility that not all of the students were interested in math.

Secondly, it suggests a false dichotomy. There are some atheists like Harris and Dawkins that are extremely vocal, passionate and on the offense with wide audiences. Others, like me, are vocal and passionate with more moderate views and in a much smaller forum. Others don't even mention their atheism to their family. Many are in between two of these points. It is unfair to call us split because what we really have is a spectrum. In our imaginary math class, the inclination of each student to go up to the blackboard covers a spectrum of preferences. Some students will always be the first ones up, others will volunteer only if additional students are needed, others try to avoid eye contact with the teacher so as to not be asked.

And finally, it paves the way for easy mischaracterization. I think most atheists would agree that Dawkins and Harris are clearly at one end of the spectrum. But if you characterize a spectrum as a split between two extremes, you are mischaracterizing the vast majority of the points that lie in between. It would be easier for religious leaders, for instance, to turn followers against atheism by citing particularly harsh phrases from Dawkins' and Harris' material. "Atheists are disrespectful. They consider God a 'psychotic delinquent!'" (a description from The God Delusion) Taking one last look at our ficticious math class, imagine the teacher showing off to a colleague: "My students are very willing to participate. They hop right up to do problems on the board!" That characterization is not representative of the entire class.

The article also uses the dread labels fundamentalist and militant. The concepts of "fundamentalist" atheists and "militant" atheists just set us up for a straw man attack. The labels don't make sense, but once applied it's easy for theists to make straw man arguments like, "There are militant atheists. Terrorists are militant. All atheists should be locked up because they are dangerous."

If you ask me, if there's a 'split' among atheists today, it's between those that realize how important our struggle is, and those who don't. Call them "passionate atheists" and "passive atheists." There is no inner conflict, so it's not divisive. It's just that some of them feel a conflict with the theists and some don't.

T-Rex: The King that Ruled the Roost

2007-04-13T14:59:00.000-06:00

Tyrannosaurus rex, the tyrant lizard king, was one of the largest known land predators of all time. Yet a recent protein analysis has linked the ferocious Trex to the humble modern day chicken. Talk about a blow to your ego! A 7.5 ton, 43-foot long, 13-inch-tooth-wielding beast one era, a backyard clucker in another.

As far as evidence goes, this give a lot of weight to the theory that some dinosaurs are related to modern day birds. While this sounds like great news for evolutionists, don't be surprised if you hear a few creationists/IDers that think this story supports their point of view.

The new finding will be viewed skeptically, admitted one of the researchers involved in the two studies. “It’s very, very, very controversial because most people have gone on record saying there’s an absolute time limit to anything that’s protein or DNA,” said Mary Schweitzer, a molecular paleontologist at
North Carolina State University.

How long do you think it will take for people to start using this concept to try and lend weight to young earth theory? I can hear it now, "The existence of those proteins proves that the fossils aren't as old as scientists think they are."

Except that making this claim means that they are validating the other science behind the discovery! Such as the antibody and mass spectrometer tests that verified the material was collagen, and the amino acid sequencing tests that verified that the material was not just "another molecule mimicking the protein and giving off a similar signal."

These are similar to the very DNA tests that reveal links between modern day humans and their ape-like evolutionary predecessors. You can't really say the science is meaningful to one case and meaningless to another. Investigation of the DNA record is one of the greatest opportunities we have to work with evolution experimentally.

So if you hear anybody trying to use this line of thought, just ask them if they've realized they are in fact supporting evidence for evolution.

Kurt Vonnegut is gone. So it goes.

2007-04-11T22:19:00.000-06:00

Kurt Vonnegut's charmingly dark humor first caught my attention in high school. I devoured the meager selection of his books that the tiny town library offered, and most of them remain in my list of favorites. These works were simultaneously poignant, haunting, funny, sarcastic, witty, visionary, and philosophic. They spoke of true horrors of the past, possible horrors of the future, and imaginary horrors of the present, and presented them all with a mix of humor and portent.

He died earlier today. A man of creative invention and critical thinking, he died of brain injuries. So it goes.

Kurt Vonnegut briefly studied at my own alma mater, the University of Chicago. He spoke on campus once during my own time there, and I was lucky enough to attend. I have a signed copy of his last novel, Timequake. Below his signature he drew a picture of an asshole. He was a pessimist.

He was also an atheist -- arguably one of the more publicly popular atheists of our time. In this aspect, we have indeed lost one of our own. As with many things in his life, he seems to have viewed his humanist beliefs with sarcastic humor:

I spoke at a Humanist Association memorial service for Dr. Asimov a few years back. I said, “Isaac is up in Heaven now.” That was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. . . . When I myself am dead, God forbid, I hope some wag will say about me, “He’s up in Heaven now.”

Vonnegut inserted some of his humanist views into his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle. One character invents a new religion known as Bokononism, which decrees that it is man himself that is sacred. (Too bad the scientologists didn't pick up on that one.) As commentary, his stories are as relevant today as ever. The Ice Nine world-destroying device in Cat's Cradle becomes biochemical weapons, or the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran. The firestorms in Germany become the roadside bombs in Iraq. Michael Crichton said this of Vonnegut in 1969:

A Vonnegut book is not cute or precious. It is literally awful, for Vonnegut is one of the few writers able to lift the lid of the garbage can, and dispassionately examine the contents. . . . The ultimate difficulty with Vonnegut is precisely this: that he refuses to say who is wrong. . . . He ascribes no blame, sets no penalties. His commentary on the assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King is the same as his comment on all other deaths: “So it goes,” he says and nothing more.

In Stranger in Strange Land, Heinlein says:

An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist — a master — and that is what Auguste Rodin was — can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is… and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be.

Vonnegut's writings, by this yardstick, were the work of a great artist. He told these stories exactly as they were, clearly and blamelessly. But he was able to force the reader to see the problems, and their causes. He will be missed dearly.

Kurt is up in Heaven now.

"that was from the devil"

2007-04-11T08:08:00.000-06:00

Ok, a short post for once. I just wanted to relate a story I found amusing and to present a challenge!

Background: this was the first time all five us (me, wife, sister-in-law, kiddo#1, kiddo#2) had been able to have a meal at the table together in several nights, due to food poisoning and much subsequent nastiness afflicting my wife and both kiddos. The other four sing (or mumble, or coo -- depending on age) a little blessing at the table most nights, that begins and ends with "the Lord's been good to us"

Others: [singing] ... and the Lord's been good to us!
Me: Except for that food poisoning thing.
Sister-in-law: That was from the devil.

Not roll-on-the-floor funny I know, but I have always found the Christian ability to invoke the devil as the antagonist in any situation fairly amusing. I don't know if anybody has named this phenomenon yet, but if not then I propose naming it the Dichotomy of Attribution.

I did not react to this statement at the time, thereby resuming our taboo against discussing religion at the table. (as evidenced by my wife furiously ignoring my comment) Although in other circumstances, this would be my answer:

So, either God was powerless to stop the devil, God is not omniscient and didn't know, or God allowed it through inaction. Which is it?

My challenge to you is to come up to a short response in 25 words or less. (Be civil. No name-calling.) I'm looking forward to hearing other responses!

Positive Atheism and the Humanist Symposium

2007-04-10T13:52:00.000-06:00

It's easy to get mired down in the negativity. Many polls show depressingly few atheists in the U.S.. Others show that more than 50% think that churches and religious groups should have more power to influence government policy. Still others show that atheists are the least trusted social group in America. Many people confuse atheism with satanism, terrorism, etc. So many people are afraid to "come out" as an atheist that it's called "the other closet."

In response to these facts it's easy to see why many atheists write hateful, angry comments about Christians and other theists. We are sometimes too quick to call them "stupid," "delusional," and "ignorant." The theists that have picked up on this are starting to call us "fundamentalist" atheists or even "militant" atheists. Many posts on atheist blogs are rants and ridicules. Many of these wind up on blog carnivals like Carnival of the Godless. And for many of us, they make for great reading and we start to feel better about ourselves.

But there is another way to feel better about ourselves. Instead of feeling better by making the theists seem lower, why not feel better by making ourselves seem higher? Instead of denigrate, encourage! There are a lot of positive views out there, but we could always use more.

When I started this blog, I had imagined that most of my posts would be rants. But when I started looking around at other blogs, I found I particularly enjoyed reading the more upbeat -- or at least even-tempered -- posts like those at Daylight Atheism and Friendly Atheist. I also love to read deconversion stories. I find them inspiring, like reading of a great victory despite greater odds. I've tried to inject some more inspiring and encouraging thoughts into my own blog. I don't think I'll ever cut out rants entirely, but I like to think I have a pretty good attitude and I try to avoid name calling.

It has worked great for me. When I started this blog I was deeply depressed. (I had been ever since the Paula Zahn debacle) Soon after starting this, and writing inside the atheist community I hadn't previously known was there, my mood brightened incredibly. So regardless of how others have taken it, this blog has certainly made one person feel a lot better.

Others have noticed this too. Adam from Daylight Atheism is starting a new blog carnival for us happy heathens called The Humanist Symposium.

Rather than general posts on atheism and religion, the purpose of the Humanist Symposium will be specifically to defend and uphold atheism as a positive worldview of morality, reason and purpose, a desirable and attractive alternative to belief systems based on religion.

I think this is a tremendous idea and am looking forward to reading it, writing posts for it, maybe even eventually hosting it. Thank you, Adam, for encouraging the encouragement.

Please spread the word!

Accepting Atheist Identity and Gaining Strength

2007-04-08T17:12:00.000-06:00

The NYTimes website recently ran an inspiring article called Accepting Gay Identity, and Gaining Strength. In it, I found many parallels to the tribulations of being an atheist in the American "Christian Nation." I am certainly not the first to see this connection. Atheism is sometimes described as the other closet. The Brights is a movement whose purpose is to adopt the strategy of the homosexual community to gain a positive presence by appropriation of the word "gay" as a label with positive connotations.

Both groups have readily identifiable issues that, from a legal standpoint alone, has cast these two groups as being "controversial." The primary issues the public has connected to atheists are a collection of first-amendment and church/state separation issues such as prayer in public schools, and removing "in God we trust" on our currency and "under God" in the pledge. The homosexual issues revolve around family, such as gay marriage and adoption and their corresponding rights.

Despite having issues of greater personal severity, the gay community has gained some social acceptance in the last 30 years (although not much legally). In the 1978-2007 period, a series of Gallup polls showed that the percentage of Americans who would vote for a homosexual president rose from 26% to 55%. Atheist statistics remained fairly stagnant over the same period, growing from 40% to only 45%.

The atheist community should take note. We can learn from the gay rights movement -- as Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell realized when they started the brights movement. We can not only learn what to do as a community, but we can learn what the sense of community can mean to the individuals within it, and how it can help them. Atheists that are wanting to come out have a wealth of gay anecdotes that can tell them exactly what to expect. This is where the NYTimes article's parallels are most useful.

The article begins by introducing a younger Zach O'Connor, before he came out. Zach was afraid of discovery. He was in denial. He even asked girls on dates in order to convince others -- and himself -- that he was straight. Sound familiar? Many atheists feel the same way, before coming out. We are afraid of negative reactions from our family and friends. We might have trouble admitting atheism to ourselves long after we stop believing in God/Allah/etc. Some of us even still attend church in order to fit in and appear as theistic as most of our peers. Many of us shy away from the term 'atheist' despite being non-religious. For both groups, these feelings and questions create negative pressures on life. Zach began doing poorly in school, and was quick to lose his temper. He didn't have many friends.

What I found so inspiring about the article was the story of acceptance that followed. Zach finally admitted his homosexuality to himself, and told his parents. The fireworks he expected to follow were non-existent. Nobody else in his family was gay, but they still completely accepted Zach.

"With all our faults," Mr. O'Connor says, "we're in this together."

Zach began meeting with a gay youth group. He was teased and mocked by some school bullies at first, but quickly gained ground socially. His grades improved and he made more friends -- even male friends. One classmate even used Zach as the subject of a class essay on heroes.

Atheists see many of the same social stigmas as homosexuals. The same school bullies that teased and mocked Zach would probably tease and mock an atheist. But Zach's classmate should not be the only one to view Zach as a hero. Atheists should feel the same way. Are you still in the closet, maybe even in denial to yourself? Are you afraid of what might happen if you came out? Zach's story is an inspiration to anybody that is afraid of discrimination.

Atheists Win High-Profile Debate? - Part II

2007-04-07T14:15:00.000-06:00

A recent debate, held in the Methodist Central Hall in London, covered the motion "We'd be better off without religion." The arguments were presented by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Professor A. C. Grayling vs. Nigel Spivey, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, and Professor Roger Scruton. It had originally been given positive coverage by the atheist crowd because of a 'winning' vote taken after the debate -- 1,205 for, and 778 against. My opinion on the matter was that the numbers were meaningless without comparitive statistics.

Now, another article covering the debate has been released by the Telegraph, and has offered more insight into these numbers. Specifically, it provides votes from the audience from before the debate. Before: 826 for, 681 against, and 364 don't knows. After: 1,205 for, 778 against, and 103 don't knows. Time to analyze!

The first thing that stood out is that the totals don't match. There were 1,871 votes before the debate, and 2,086 after. This might mean that there were more than 200 walk-ins, leading to a larger audience at the end. Or it might mean that the passionate debate had stirred more of the audience to vote afterware. Or something else entirely, or all of the above. So let's look at these as percentages. Before: 44.1% for, 36.3% against, 19.5% don't know. After: 57.7% for, 37.3% against, and 4.9% don't know.

Both for and against votes gained ground! The theistic point of view by 1%, the atheistic point of view by 13.6%. The "don't knows" dropped by 14.6%. This means that both sides were being very persuasive. The fact that the theistic view netted a gain (ignoring any side-switchers we don't know about) means that this isn't the big atheist victory we were hoping for. Because in my opinion a big victory would be theistic converts.

But since the atheistic point of view gained more ground, I will say that it's a small victory for atheists. Convincing those corresponding to the agnostic viewpoint still means putting more numbers into the atheist crowd.

Einstein & Faith

2007-04-06T21:03:00.000-06:00

Time.com has a new article up that investigates Einstein's position in regards to religious faith. It is an issue that requires investigation, because Einstein frequently used God metaphorically, such as in the famouse phrase, "God does not play dice." Many people take this literally, and will argue with atheists by pointing out that Einstein believed in God.

He didn't -- at least not Abraham's God. He believed in Spinoza's God -- a style of pantheism. Einstein wasn't shy about invoking the word "God" to represent his beliefs, though. It's caused no end of confusion -- to the point where Dawkins has to spend time in The God Delusion to define what he called the Einsteinian God.

The Time article doesn't take the same position that Dawkins does -- at least to my reading. It describes Einstein as angry at being called an atheist.

But throughout his life, Einstein was consistent in rejecting the charge that he was an atheist. "There are people who say there is no God," he told a friend. "But what makes me really angry is that they quote me for support of such views." And unlike Sigmund Freud or Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw, Einstein never felt the urge to denigrate those who believed in God; instead, he tended to denigrate atheists. "What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos," he explained.

That is not how I read those quotes at all. Just because he didn't denigrate those who believed in God doesn't mean he didn't have atheist views. It seems to me that Einstein only wanted to distance himself from a certain type of atheist. In the same way that I want to distance myself from certain types of atheists. It's true, some of them are just offensive and I don't like them representing me. I don't like it when atheists try to give religious labels to 'our' things -- like saying that Darwin is our saint, Dawkins and Harris are our prophets, and The Origin of Species is our bible. I hate that. And I just think it sounds like Einstein has the same feelings towards atheists that think they know all of the answers to the universe.

I find the whole article seemed to have been written in a religious slant, as if it were defending Einstein as a religious person. Instead the article mostly just tried to explain what he did believe, as if to emphasize the fact that he believed something. It even omitted (innocently or otherwise) what many atheists consider to be the defining quote about Einstein's religious views:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

If the article had mentioned that quote, it would have had a harder time coming to these wishy-washy conclusions on Einstein:

Around the time he turned 50, he began to articulate more clearly--in various essays, interviews and letters--his deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.

For some people, miracles serve as evidence of God's existence. For Einstein it was the absence of miracles that reflected divine providence.

It feels like the article is trying to paint Einstein's beliefs as an interpretation of God, not as an atheist that is fascinated by the mysteries of the universe. The author is about to publish a biography of Einstein. I think I'll pass.

The Geek-Atheism Corollary

2007-04-04T16:51:00.000-06:00

Is there a relationship between being a geek and being an atheist? An article at Shuzak/m4th.com has looked at this. First, I want to appropriate their definition of "geek" which I found good except for one large problem:

They are the people that collect information almost compulsively and nurture deep understandings of very obscure branches of knowledge. .... They find great joy in learning a new thing, to extending our knowledge and sharing knowledge with another that can appreciate it.

Yes, I believe geeks are compulsive information fiends. The joy geeks find in knowledge is undeniable. But it does not necessarily mean they are intelligent. I love crossword puzzles, even though I'm horrible at them. The joy I get from these puzzles doesn't guarantee me the ability to solve them. In the same way, a love to learn does not guarantee the tools to use the gained information intelligently or the have the deep understandings the article refers to.

Unfortunately, I found the rest of the article to be just as hit-and-miss as this definition. The article makes 5 points:

Geeks are different and tend to look beyond mainstream ideas, including religion.
Geeks do not need religion as a social interaction.
Geeks are awed by the complexity of the universe and dismiss the idea of a creator as overly simplistic.
Geeks think logically, which leads to a bias towards logical conclusions instead of faith-based conclusions.
Higher intelligence leads to a desire to disprove ideas they cannot make sense of.

This starts out well but starts to misfire quickly. The first two points I agree with and will not comment on. But I find the last three points full of flawed reasoning, flawed assumptions, and flawed observations.

I should point out that I do agree with the premise that for many people a strong geekiness can lead to atheism. I think this is simply due to the use of the same analytical thinking used to absorb (successfully or otherwise) large amounts of information. That said, I definitely have problems with this articles arguments:

The Complexity of the Universe:
One of the claims from Intelligent Design proponents is that "irreducible complexity" is a sign that a designer was necessary. Typical examples that IDers point to are the mammalian eye and the bacterial flagellum. They are such complex interactions of many elements, say the IDers, that intermediary steps with some of these elements only partially developed are not possible. Therefore a designer must have taken control. ID opponents point out that the mysteries of the eye and flagellum development have already been unwound, and that a series of simple evolutionary steps is easily accountable. Compare this to what the m4th.com article says:

From the delicate and intricate dance of subatomic particles to the raging of stars thousands of times larger than our earth, the complexity and beauty of the universe awe many of those geeks who have looked deeply into physics. It might make sense to think that many such geeks simply find something as simple as a creator an overly simplistic explanation for something so elegant.

It almost sounds like they're defending Intelligent Design, doesn't it? Scientists aim for the simple, not the complex -- such as the grand unified theory. The beauty of E=mc² and F=ma are not ones of complexity, but of simplicity. Scientists believe that the simpler the answer, the more likely it is to be correct. Hence the success of evolution! I believe the author of the above statement is confusing complexity with scale. The universe is huge, but scientists believe that it runs on simple laws and interactions with simple particles.

On the other hand, I don't find the idea of a creator to be a simple one. An omnipotent, omniscient, eternal god that was able to create the universe and everything in it in six days must be more complicated than anything he or she has created. Just because theists don't try to explain the existence of their god doesn't mean that their creator is simple.

Logical Conclusions and Bias:
While it is true, as the article states, that scientists and geeks rely (or, at least, tend to rely) on logic rather than faith, I have trouble with its conclusion. Here is what the article says:

Because they are intelligent, they believe that their approach to problems is right. Religion has no place in science. Most of what we know is gathered from reading, watching and hearing various mediums. Since we choose what to read, watch, or hear, all three of these faculties are fundamentally biased. Since geeks have a strong bias towards logic, the end result is a disbelief in a higher power, which relies on faith.

I don't think atheism has anything to do with being biased. The author's argument is that logic leads to bias against illogical thought, which leads to atheism. I do think logic and critical thinking can lead to atheism, by not by way of a bias. The critical thinking leads directly to the conclusion that there is not enough evidence to support a god. This is almost like saying that a mathematician produces correct answers because he is biased against answers that are not produced by a problem's solution. It's not a bias, it's a conclusion.

Contentious Intelligence:
This argument claimed that being more intelligent leads to a greater desire to argue with those around you. There are two goals when arguing a topic. One is to prove the other person wrong, the other is to play devil's advocate in order to more fully investigate an idea. Coming from a college where I got to hear a lot of brilliant people debate, I can say from experience that intelligence does in fact lead to argument, usually of the second variety. But this article seems to adhere to the first variety: proving others wrong. From this article, it sounds like the act of proving someone wrong is akin to feeding your intelligence, which leads to geeks debating theists about their established beliefs. I have two problems with this.

The quickest and most reliable way to be rewarded for intelligence is to prove someone else wrong (critical thinking). Such a strategy gives you an immediate result and also establishes a sense of superior intelligence. Being constructive is much less rewarding. .... This leads many intelligent people to spend time attempting to disprove many established ideas that do not make sense to them.

The idea that critical thinking is only more satisfying when used to disprove other ideas rather than constructively build new ones is a nothing more than schadenfreudian snobbery. There are the occasional scientific revolution now and then, but most of the time scientists are happy expounding on others ideas, not destroying them. Isaac Newton famously said, "If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."

But the more problematic claim is that it is an atheist's goal is to disprove established ideas. The purpose of an atheist's logic is not to disprove a higher power -- it's to reveal that there isn't any evidence supporting a higher power. You can't prove the nonexistance of anything. As Dawkins says, you can't prove beyond a doubt that there aren't fairies in the bottom of the garden. I can't prove beyond a doubt that a 6,000 year old invisible dragon isn't sitting right next to me. Bertrand Russell's famous case for this was that you can't prove without a doubt that a teapot isn't orbiting Mars right now. There is no proof supporting it, but you can't disprove it either. (The authors' article does mention this later in the argument -- but why didn't they realize the fault in this claim I don't know.)

This is the position atheists must take with theists. Fantastic claims require fantastic evidence, and we all need to remember that atheism is the default, neutral position. The belief in a higher power is the fantastic claim, and that is what requires fantastic evidence. It is not on our shoulders to disprove anything, but it is on theirs to prove it.

Misleading Polls: Nearly half of all atheists believe in God!

2007-04-02T23:33:00.000-06:00

I've recently looked at my views on what atheists are and what we aren't. I was specifically speaking about three labels: Religion, Belief, and Fundamentalism. (atheist "fundamentalism," by the way, is a concept that is stirring some internal debate recently) I concluded that "fundamentalism" could not be applied to atheism because it implied a spectrum of adherence to our defining principle: that we do not believe in God.

According to Newsweek, nearly half (or more) of atheists and agnostics do believe there is a spectrum. (Or maybe -- just maybe -- it's a shoddy poll that we take with a grain of salt.)

Question #12 in the poll asks what people belief when it comes to human creation/evolution. Here are the responses given by those that defined themselves as agnostic or atheist:

God had no part in the evolution of humans from lower life forms: 45%
God guided the process of evolution of humans from lower life forms: 27%
God created humans pretty much in the present form sometime in the last 10,000 years: 13%
Other/Don't know: 15%

Well, this is a little surprising. According to this poll, 40% of all agnostics and atheists believe that God created humans in one way or another. Would you be surprised if you found out that 40% of all members of the Democratic Party were Republicans? Me too. Would you be surprised in you found out that 40% of the population of Maine lived outside of Maine? Sure. Would you be surprised if 40% of photographers had never used a camera before? Yup. I think if the pollers had actually looked at this information, they would have begun to question the accuracy of their poll.

But the problems don't stop there. Can you see the problem with the phrasing of the question? I paraphrased it above, but here is the exact 'atheist answer':

Humans developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.

The question doesn't even allow for the possible non-existance of God. It states that there is a God, but he just didn't happen to guide evolution. I suppose that makes this the 'deist answer.' Atheism simply isn't represented here. Does this remind anyone else of the Paula Zahn lets-talk-about-atheists-while-they're-not-here-to-defend-themselves episode? How are we supposed to answer that in a way that doesn't make it sound like we just don't know?

This is like presenting followers of Judaism with the question, "Which represents your point of view: when Jesus the son of God was resurrected and joined his Father in heaved he was: a) dead for exactly three days, and was lifted upwards through the clouds; b) dead for exactly three days, and disappeared in a flash of light; c) dead for an unknown period of time, and either flew upwards or disappeared wholly; or d) other/don't know." It's a loaded question. None of the answers match our point of view.

Fortunately there are plenty of other polls to look at. ARIS data from 2001 (with a data set 50 times larger than the Newsweek poll, I might add) used the term "no religion" to group atheists, agnostics, humanists, secularists, and "no religion" respondants. This group came in with an impressive 14.1%! Even better, it nearly doubled from 8.2% in 1990 -- just 11 years!

ARIS also showed that some US states had as many as 25% of its population declare "no religion." Washington state was in the lead with the 25% number -- imagine living in a state with 1 out of every 4 people an atheist! USA Today has an interactive flash map of this data that shows the religious breakdown state-by-state. I never would have realized that "no religion" (me) outnumbered Baptist (my wife) in Kansas! In fact, in many states, "no religion" comes in second.

Another interesting tidbit in the ARIS data shows some validation to my observation that more people are switching to atheism that away from it. In the 2001 data, it shows that "no religion" had the highest of 22 groups of people that Switched In (in sheer number), and was the third highest in net gain (percentage). In sheer numbers, it's gaining members about six times as fast as it's losing them. (p. 25 in the PDF, p. 24 in the report)

The Pew Research Center, in a recent study, showed 12% of Americans as secular (which they define as atheist, agnostic, or no religion). This is up 4% in just the last 20 years. The same poll also shows slight downward trends over the last five years to the statement "I never doubt the existence of God."

Religious Tolerance summarizes the results of a USA Today/Gallup poll in Jan. 2002:

Almost half of American adults appear to be alienated from organized religion. If current trends continue, most adults will not call themselves religious within a few years.

I think we can safely and happily ignore the Newsweek poll.

Jolt with my Java: Revised

2007-03-31T16:32:00.000-06:00

Mojoey reported on a disturbing message at Starbucks -- on one of their coffee cups! The Starbucks the way i see it program, which prints messages submitted from their customers on the sides of their coffee cups, is now accepting messages from religious groups, and Mojoey happened upon message #224, from Dr. Jonathan Wells, a Discovery Institute supporter:

Darwinism's impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism's connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical record. And the record is not pretty.
-- Dr. Jonathan Wells
Biologist and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design.

Reading that, I realized how easy it would be to swap out a few words and arrive at the following statement: (the modified words are italicized)

Christianity's impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Christianity's connection with wars, witch-hunts and discrimination is a matter of historical record. And the record is not pretty.

Anybody else want to make a version?

Hey God, Don't Hurt Yourself

2007-03-30T17:27:00.000-06:00

As some may or may not know, I have started reading the bible. (So that I can hold my own in a debate if bible trivia comes up.) I cruised through Genesis and Exodus pretty quickly, and have waded through the mire that is Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Things got better with Joshua, and I'm reading Judges right now.

And I just had to share what has to be the most ridiculous miracle of all time (at least, I hope so). It takes place in the story of Gideon. Here is Judges 6:36-40, Modern King James Version

³⁶ And Gideon said to God, If You will save Israel by my hand, as You have said, ³⁷ behold, I will put a fleece of wool in the grain-floor. And if the dew is on the fleece only, and dry upon all the ground, then I shall know that You will save Israel by my hand, as You have said. ³⁸ And it was so. For he rose up early in the morning and gathered the fleece together, and wrung the dew out of the fleece, a bowl full of water.
³⁹ And Gideon said to God, Let not Your anger be hot against me, and I will speak but this once. I pray You, let me test but this once with the fleece. Let it now be dry only upon the fleece, and upon all the ground let there be dew. ⁴⁰ And God did so that night. For it was dry upon the fleece only, and there was dew on all the ground.

Don't hurt yourself, God. I know you have to take breaks every now and then, but is this really the same god who blew life into Adam by doing CPR through his nose? First off, you're taking orders here. This isn't the Burning Bush God that said to Moses, "Surprise! Your staff is a snake now! Surprise! Your arm is leprous now!" You're all out of the "lets rain fire and hail from the sky at the same time!" miracles. No, by this point in the bible you're all out of creative ideas, and just sitting back and opening the 1-900-PROPHET request line. (three goat sacrifices for the first minute, a turtle dove for every additional minute)

Some of these prophets are a little more creative than others, like when Joshua asked you to stop the sun and moon in the sky. But please, if you get a dumb one, take it upon yourself to add that little zing that says, "I am that I am! And I am totally awesome!"

I would have thought that the same god that created the naked molerat, quantum mechanics, the Grand Tetons, and the IRS could come up with something a little more unusual, mysterious, beautiful, or evil than a piece of wet wool.

Atheists Win High-Profile Debate?

2007-03-30T07:28:00.000-06:00

Hitchens, Grayling, and Dawkings vs. Spivey, Scruton, and Neuberger. The debate was, "would we be better off without religion," sponsored by intelligence² in Westminster Hall, London. I wish I could have attended! You can read James Randerson's summary for more details, but here is a great quote:

How sweet, [Dawkins] wondered, would Haydn's Evolution Oratorio or Beethoven's Mesozoic Symphony have sounded?

Besides, said Mr Hitchens, there is ample beauty in nature without the need to believe in myth. "Take a look through the Hubble telescope and look at the beauty and majesty of what you will see," he said, "And you want to exchange that for the burning bush?"

What I want to focus on is the debate victory. An audience vote afterwards revealed a win for the atheist panel, with 1,205 votes for, 778 against. (60.7%) Sounds great, right? Big atheist win! Except that without information on the makeup of the audience, these numbers ring hollow. I'm more interested in knowing how many theists admitted the atheists victorious -- or vice versa.

What if the audience was 61% atheist? In politics, that vote would be known as "along party lines." What if the audience was 80% atheist? That means that some of the atheists thought that the theists had won the debate, and that certainly wouldn't feel like a victory. If the audience demographic corresponded to the public statistics -- which in England is around 33% atheist, according to a BBC poll -- then that's very encouraging. But I have a hunch that the debate audience had a higher percentage, as a Dawkins appearance would no doubt attract a lot of atheists.

But to end on a high note, here is a quote from Dawkins, relating the aftermath of a debate he held against the Archbishop of York. Atheists can relax in this victory, as this time it was confirmed by a clergyman:

I once had a public debate with the then Archbishop of York, and The Observer quoted the verdict of one disconsolate clergyman as he left the hall: "That was easy to sum up - Lions 10, Christians nil."

What Atheism Is and Isn't

2007-03-29T02:07:00.000-06:00

The term "fundamentalist atheist" is starting to irk me. Says the pot to the kettle: you're black. But I've heard this enough that I wanted to write out what I think atheism/atheists can and can not be described as. This is all my opinion of course, and everyone is entitled to their own. There is no Southern Atheist Convention that requires atheists to follow a certain doctrine or they get kicked out. (and still, some theists call us "closed-minded")

Is Atheism a Religion?
Atheism does not hold any religious beliefs, and does not adhere to any religious doctrines. So no, atheism is not a Religion (capital 'r') in the classic sense. Atheism isn't a set of beliefs, it's a lack of beliefs. It's the default state. All infants are atheists because they haven't learned otherwise. It's only after introducing beliefs to the child that it will become a member of a religion. If the child is never taught religious beliefs, they would remain an atheist.

Still, I think that atheism is a religion (lowercase 'r') as a demographic set. If there was a survey that asked me "What is your religion?" I would answer "atheism." It is a valid label for the demographic group I belong to. As a label, atheism is a religion in the same way that zero is a number. Zero has no value, but it is still a number.

Is Atheism a Belief?
No. Atheism is the position of having no beliefs. While an atheist could declare their position to be "I believe there is no God" (sometimes referred to as strong atheism), describing the lack of something should not be confused with an actual belief. This is simply because there is nothing there to believe. Imagine two explorers charting a never-before-seen, uninhabited island. One says to the other, "What race do the people belong to?" The second explorer says, "There are no people. It's uninhabited." The first one nods and replies, "They must be indigenous, then." This is ridiculous because the lack of people can not be described as a type of people.

Is there such a thing as a Fundamentalist Atheist?
No. The vast majority of definitions available for the term Fundamentalism reveal its overwhelming connection to religion and the bible. These definitions use phrases like "movement in American Protestantism," "infallibility of the bible," "religious movement," "opposition to secularism," "adherence to the theology of..." The only secular definition I could find was strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles.

Now, atheists do have a basic principle: we do not believe in a divine being. But it is not something that can be adhered to, strictly or otherwise, because it is a defining principle. There is no spectrum of adherence to this principle among atheists. (thought when applied to people in general, of course, you get the theist/agnostic/atheist spectrum) It is the equivalent of a theist's belief in a god as their defining principle. You can't call every Christian that believes in God a fundamentalist, because that belief is one of their defining principles.

Want more? Atheist Revolution recently had a great post (one of the inspirations for this one) where he has tried to investigate Atheist Extremism. Two of the terms he (? I think vjack is a he....) looks at are "fundamentalist atheist" and "militant atheist."

In a nutshell, religious fundamentalism is about adherence to a particular doctrine, atheism has no doctrine, and therefore, there can be no fundamentalist atheism.

The Uncredible Hallq looked at fundamentalist atheism and militant atheism fairly recently as well. He decides that it is used by theists who either want to slam atheists, or are using the term to mean "hard core."

But outside slamming atheists, fundamentalism has always mainly applied to people who believe their given holy book is infallible. Sometimes, this is taken to the point of people becoming convinced that "God exists because the Bible says so" is a good argument.

And finally, I will direct you to The One With Aldacron, who agrees with The Uncredible Hallq that the term is used as a replacement for "hard core" or, as The One phrases it, "hardline."

The term “atheist fundamentalist” is an oxymoron. Fundamentalism arises from faith. Atheists have no faith. So there is no such thing as an atheist fundamentalist. There are some militant atheists out there who love to provoke confrontations with the religious. But I think they are rare. Hardline atheists are those who stand up for atheism and denounce religion for what it is.

Faith Healing

2007-03-28T10:43:00.000-06:00

Brian over at Primordial Blog has just concluded his excellent four part series on faith healing. (one two three four). Brian was a fundamentalist before his deconversion, and spent some time faith healing himself. Reading about this from an inside perspective is illuminating. The failures of faith healing sound like they were an influential element in his deconversion.

Another good faith healing story is this YouTube video, where James "The Amazing" Randi debunks the TV Faith healer Peter Popoff.

I've also seen this story on a few TV specials. Popoff was using a wireless earpiece and was getting his information from his wife, who was reading them off of prayer cards. Honestly, did it never occur to these people, "Wow, he just told me exactly what I wrote on my prayer card fifteen minutes ago! What a coincidence!"

An amusing anecdote related to the Randi/Popoff case was how Randi first publicly played the evidential tape. It was on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Randi made sure the show manager didn't tell Carson about the tape, just so he could see Carson's face when he played it! There was apparently an expletive that had to be edited out for the broadcast.

Daylight Atheism also has a good article investigating faith healing. These faith healers are nothing more than con artists. The only question seems to be whether or not any of them believe in themselves. In the case of Popoff, clearly no. But I've heard that many faith-healing recipients do briefly convince themselves that they are healed. If the faith healer only sees them when they believe they are healed, maybe he really can believe in himself. It's an enforced delusion.

Unfortunately, as the Primoridal Blog series shows, most people who come to realize that they aren't cured after all, blame themselves. They decide that God had taken aware the healing out of spite, because they didn't have enough faith. Some are even estranged by friends, under the conclusion that they must be harboring secret evils. So now it's a self-reinforcing delusion. It's not evidence that God doesn't exist, because he does exist, so it must be something else.

Anthony Thomas's documentary A Question of Miracles (which I would like to see, if anyone knows how to find it on DVD) included some follow-up with people healed by faith-healer Benny Hinn. One of which was a brain tumor patient, who died a couple of months after being "healed." The parents were later interviewed:

As the couple discuss their child's succumbing to the tumors, no allusion of any measure is expressed of Hinn being culpable of perpetuating false hope. The couple sees themselves, not Hinn, as a possible cause that their son did not receive a healing. The father suggests his son's death may be a result of generational curses or sin of either himself or his father. When the HBO interviewer asked where he arrived at such a notion, the father responded, "Pastor Benny."

Now it isn't just a self-reinforced delusion. This is an actively enforced scam! It sounds like Benny Hinn might be another 'faith healer' that doesn't necessarily believe in himself. Another note: this is after they pledge several thousand dollars to Benny Hinn.

Hello, Atheist Blogroll!

2007-03-27T21:33:00.000-06:00

I'm happy to report that I've been added to Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll, a huge resource of material from atheists wanting to share their views and news. If you've come to Atheist Self from the Atheist Blogroll: welcome!

Reinforced Ignorance

2007-03-27T01:16:00.000-06:00

I grew up in a very small factory town in southwest Virginia. It is a very poor area, and for the first half of the 20th century most of the population worked for one of the several large furniture factories in town. In the way that some towns revolve around mining, this town revolved around the factories. As such, the factories had a great deal of local political power.

Add to this the fact that this town is an independent city -- not part of a larger county -- and you can imagine how small and poor the school system was. The story I heard growing up is that the factory owners, who were also the city politicians, intentionally maintained low standards and poor funds to the school system. The idea was that if a student was not educated, they would be more likely to work for the factory themselves after finishing school -- if not even earlier, after dropping out.

They were breeding ignorance for their own advantage.

This was every bit as cruel as it sounds, but many religious powers in the world continue to do the exact same thing. The Creationism / Creation Science / Intelligent Design / Whatever-it-will-be-called-next movement has been trying to paint evolution as a controversial "just-a-theory" for decades. They want warning stickers placed on textbooks, creationist malarky to be given equal treatment, and have even gone so far as to glue textbook pages together to hide offending material.

But these religious zombie masters go even further than just stripping people of their educational potential. They are actively pumping their sheep full of misinformation. I discussed the Creation Museum disaster yesterday, but it certainly doesn't end there. We've all heard about Conservapedia, too. We've also heard about the child abuse recorded in the documentary Jesus Camp, whose own website proudly makes it sound like a bile-inducing horror film:

Jesus Camp follows a group of young children to Pastor Becky Fisher's "Kids on Fire Summer Camp," where kids are taught to become dedicated Christian soldiers in God's army and are schooled in how to take back America for Christ. The film is a first-ever look into an intense training ground that recruits born-again Christian children to become an active part of America's political future.

"army" ... "training ground" ... "recruits" ... In other words, it's the Christian version of a radical Madrasah school!

There are a couple of YouTube videos that were referenced on Dawkins' site earlier today that really horrified me. The level of ignorance these videos are trying to spread makes my head spin.

The first one really drives home an opinion I've long had -- Creationists just don't understand long periods of time. This guy thinks that a jar of peanut butter will -- according to his straw-man version of evolution -- occassionally spawn new life? Let's ignore the fact that the chemical composition of peanut butter is far different than the chemical environment of early earth. He is saying the equivalent of, just because none of the lottery tickets I've bought ever won anything, winning lottery tickets must not exist. How many times do you buy peanut butter in your lifetime? 100 times? 200 times? How does that possibly compare to a billion billion billion molecules interacting with each other every second for a billion years?

The second one is labelled "The atheist's nightmare" and that's true. Except the banana isn't the nightmare, it's the guy holding it that scares me. I'd like to hear what this guy has to say about brazil nuts. Or coconuts. Or pineapples.

Mouse Vision, the Creation Museum, and the God FAQ

2007-03-27T00:33:00.000-06:00

It's been a few days now since my last post. My wife and both kids were suffering food poisoning all weekend, and you would not believe what all I've had to clean up in the last couple of days. Kiddo #2, my poor darling daughter, had it worst of all. She threw up about 18 times -- and I won't even mention what came out the other end, except to say that it coated myself, my wife, and our bed. Everyone is doing much better now, though, and I'm expecting a completely normal day tomorrow.

Ahem..... Now that that's over with....

I found a bit of science news particularly fascinating last Friday. Humans (most of us, at least) have what is called trichromatic vision. In other words, we have three different types of cone cells in our eyes which receive different sections of our visible spectrum. Each type of receptor can differentiate between about 100 different shades, so all told the human eye can differentiate between about 1,000,000 colors. Humans and other primates are fairly unique among mammals in our trichromatic vision. (Although, some women are tetrachromates, and can see about 100,000,000 colors!)

Mice, on the other hand, are dichromates. Until now! Scientists have produced a genetically modified mouse that has trichromatic vision. On the surface, this is just pretty cool. But if you look deeper, there are two fascinating elements of this study that show how simple the evolutionary process was to get from di- to trichromatic vision.

The first thing is that the process only involved introducing a single human gene into a mouse chromosome. Just one gene. The second is that the mouse was able to interpret data from the extra receptor. Which means that the brain doesn't need to evolve at all in order to interpret the extra data.

The evolution of the eye is a hot topic in the Intelligent Design / Evolution farce. ID people claim that the eye is an example of irreducible complexity. Yet here is a tremendous example of how simple an evolutionary advance in the development of an eye can be. Instead of being irreducibly complex, here is an evolutionary step that is almost irreducibly simple. Just one gene! (Humans are thought to have about 35,000 genes total) It also has no dependencies, it's just beautifully simple.

(Here is a diagram that shows the visual difference between di- and trichromatic vision.)

That was the good news. Now for the bad news. I just heard about the new Creation Museum that will be opening this June in Cincinnati. I've always thought of museums as the very pinnacle of science. I grew up in Virginia, and when I think museum, I think Smithsonian. The Creation Museum is cunningly designed to sap intelligence right out of people. There are exhibits like "Life on the Ark: A real Survivor story." and "T. rex: The Terror that Adam's sin unleashed!" and how T. rex was a vegetarian in the Garden of Eden.

What's really scary is that this is a $27 Million project. And it apparently looks pretty sharp. This is scary because of how many people might actually fall for this. I'm glad my kids aren't going to school in Cincinatti, it's just going to be a matter of time before some "teach the controversy!" school board decides that this "museum" is a good field-trip destination.

Couldn't they think of anything better to do with $27 Million? What about feeding kids in third-world countries? What about providing jobs for the unemployed in the US? They had to go and build a shrine of ignorance?

Well, here's something to cheer you up. The Official God FAQ -- it contains detailed, accurate answers to every important question that has ever been asked about God. Yet it has condensed it all down into a very accessible, easy-to-reference collections of answers. Definitely worth reading, memorizing, and quoting often.

Where is that Christian Love?

2007-03-23T23:12:00.000-06:00

The Gainesville press has a good article on the recent free hugs event at the University of Florida. They set up a table in Turlington Plaza, where sidewalk bible-thumpers tend to preach fire and brimstone. One such thumper, Frank Zaccaro, was approached by the atheists and offered a hug. He jumped backwards, shouting, "No, I don't want that!"

Oooh! Atheist cooties!

This is just yet another example of that wonderful Christian Love I keep hearing about. When will honest bumper stickers going to come out, that say, Jesus Loves Me. Not You. Or the honest bracelets that say, Who Would Jesus Hate?

Theists have a well-developed blind eye. They can ignore the darndest things! A tornado rips through a trailer park, killing one family and sparing another. Does the (religious) surviving family question God for killing their neighbors? Probably not. If they're like most survivors, they thank God for letting them live! No blame. All praise. I wish my job worked like that.

One of my bigger pet peeves is when atheists are accused of not having any morals. Now which morals would those be? The ones from the bible -- where you are instructed to kill your children if they don't respect you? How about killing wives that aren't virgins? Or not touching women for a week after they menstruate, until she sacrifices two birds? But ok, enough about bronze age behavior. What about present day?

I really only have to give one example. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church picketed Mr. Rogers' funeral! Mr. Rogers! The nicest guy in the entire universe!

Need more? Well, we have pastors that sexually abuse their own children and fondle six year old girls' privates. If you get your morals from the bible, pastors are therefore the experts at moral values, right? It must be even more so in the Catholic church, where priests are thought to have a hotline directly to God, as they are able to speak on behalf of God to forgive sins, etc. Surely God would have said something to them about the estimated 1,400 cases of sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests in the US in the last 22 years.

Christian Love is a big enough problem that there are groups like Stop Baptist Predators, and Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

Most of us aren't facing this kind of problem -- my condolences if you are. Most of use see the Frank Zaccaros of the world. Stardust has been toying with talking with a theist (that goes by "Big Sucker"!) on a Gods4Suckers thread. He's (or She's?) relatively harmless, but a good example of what we face on a regular basis.

atheists always make me laugh. can’t ever make up their mind about evolution. .... atheists don’t pay attention to REAL science (law of biogenesis), just conjecture with no PROOF. ... Nietzsche believed that blacks and jews were subhuman….great guy.

Just ignorant taunts. Though, for being relatively harmless, he's still trying to be a thorn in our paw. (yet too mis-informed to really make me want to respond! Take a look at the full post to see the unbridled ignorance.)

Unfortunately we also see a lot of middle ground. Poor PossumMomma had a bitter response to her thread on a newspaper blog site -- looking for fellow atheists in Austin. As she put it, she "attracted a few fundies." Here is a sample:

PM- I don't care where you go. Just get the hell out of here. This is gods town and you can take your family with you. We dont need are kind mixing with your kind. I read your blog. Same bullshit. Different libral. Tolerance is overated.
- Dick

How beautiful, that Christian love is.

It's so bad, in fact, that even theists joke about it. So to wrap up this long post, here's a funny story.

We had an amusing line from kiddo #1 tonight at the dinner table. He's a couple of months shy of his third birthday, very talkative, and quick to repeat whatever we say -- in the possessive two-year-old style. We were discussing a children's book, Rolly Poly Olie, which is about a robot built of circular shapes.

Auntie: In one story, new neighbors move in, and they're all robots made of square shapes. They...
Mom: Burn a cross in their yard?
Auntie: No [snicker] it's sweet. They learn about discrimination.
Kiddo #1: I want to burn a cross in the yard!
[ much laughter from all ]

We're still learing to watch what we say!

Apparently, so are the theists.

Stark, New Atheism, and Religion on the Defense

2007-03-22T10:16:00.000-06:00

Pete Stark, as many of us now know, is the highest elected official to acknowledge a non-theistic view. I wrote a post when I first heard the news of the coming-out, when it was still an unknown Congressperson, but I haven't written anything about it since. I was waiting to see what the reaction would be....

Which was almost disappointing! The biggest fuss I heard was from the Christian Seniors organization, who went on to talk about child-strangling liberals. But for the most part, it was all neutral and positive reactions. Voters (in his district) seem unfazed. Some news articles praised Stark. Most were neutral. I even read news articles from Christian news organizations. The Christian Broadcasting network had two mentions -- a news report titled Atheist Congressman Honored, and a snippet in the Christian World News Religion Roundup -- both were straight unbiased reporting, with no opinions or inserted response at all. BeliefNet also had a completely unbiased report. I did find an opinion piece on GetReligion.com, but it turned the story against the $1,000 payout (by the Secular Coalition for America for the nomination), and not the coming out!

I can't believe it. I never thought we'd get away with an atheist Congressperson without some serious backlash. Maybe we really will be seeing more atheists coming out.

The part of Congressman Stark's announcement that I found most interesting was his connection with Unitarianism. I have written in the past that a nontheist politician would suffer from not having religious group to back them. Unitarianism is a clever loophole in my theory! Stark has found a way to be atheist and be part of a group.

Hemant at FriendlyAtheist had a good article last week on the isolation that most atheists face -- or impose on themselves. He points out that well-known Christians are usually associated with their organizations. There aren't single lonely voices in big Christian names. Charismatic leaders and large followings are a symbiotic relationship. The leaders' charisma brings in followers, which makes the leader more powerful and able to reach more would-be followers.

The big atheists, though -- like Dawkins, and Harris -- are isolated voices, and lack a similar mutually-beneficial environment.

Hemant points out that there are a growing number of secular groups, but even the biggest are tiny compared to any religious organizations, and their leaders are relatively obscure. Definitely not household names. The problem, while it does involve the relative sizes of the religious vs. secular populations, also lies with the way atheists are organized. Or... aren't organized.

But despite our nebulous lack of organization, I think we're really starting to be seen as a growing threat. Think back a few months in US politics. Barak Obama was first being seen as a possible presidential candidate, which of course was the cue for all of the slimeball political groups out there to start hurling their slime. At one point, Obama was accused of attending a radical Madrassa school as a child. This was not true, but it did reveal that the Republicans considered Obama to be a real threat, which made me quite happy.

Do theists see atheism as a threat? Maybe not on the streetcorner, but I think theists are starting to realize that atheism is growing strong in the online arena. Online, theists are starting to get on the defensive. Unable to come up with anything truly innovative, they are instead flattering us with imitation.

They think Wikipedia is too liberal? They make Conservapedia.

Too many atheists on YouTube? They make GodTube.

Heathens are laughing at their MySpace pages? They make HisHolySpace.

I'm waiting for HolyDigg next. Scratch that, I just found Gospelshout.

I find this encouraging! Disgusting, but encouraging.

new feed address

2007-03-21T09:27:00.000-06:00

On the odd chance you're reading this odd blog through an odd feed reader, or maybe even a normal feed reader, please update/resubscribe the feed url. I've just signed up on FeedBurner so I can get stats on all two of my readers! You can use the Feed link on the top right, or if you're using Firefox or IE7, you can just click the RSS icon. If you want the direct url, it is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AtheistSelf

Not using a feed reader? I recommend Google's online reader. That's what I use on all 67 of the blogs I subscribe to. It will suck the free time right out of your day! Or, maybe it's the 67 blogs that do that. I'm not sure.

Religious Indoctrination and Children's Television

2007-03-20T12:22:00.000-06:00

What are Saturday morning cartoons full of? Aside from the occassional bout of good 'ol toon violence, they're mostly full of commercials targetting children. Loads of them. Overall, in America, the average child sees 40,000 commercials annually.

The problem, especially with young children, is that they don't have a good grasp on what is truth and what is exaggeration -- or just plain fiction. In other words, children don't have that crucial "grain of salt" we adults take our advertisement with, until they're about ten years old. Younger than that, and they're easy and susceptable targets for the advertisement's message. If they see a commercial that tells them that all the cool kids have a Voltfire Extra Super-duty Cargo Train Robot Commander, they want one too. Young children are so vulnerable that some countries outlaw television advertising to children altogether.

Yet the vast majority of families in the US take advantage of their children in exactly the same way. Religious Indoctrination starts long before children have any hope of weighing the truth of what they are being exposed to. It amazes me to think of all the wars, all the deaths, all the suffering, and all of the hate that has resulted from the corruption of vulnerable children.

CARU, the Children's Advertising Review Unit has posted guidelines for what is and isn't suitable in children's ads. It's too bad nobody uses these guidelines for religious indoctrination, as it clearly voilates them. Read these segments from section 2b Product Presentation and Claims in their guidelines, and imagine it's talking about religious indoctrination:

To avoid deceptive and/or inappropriate advertising to children involving product presentations and claims:

1. Copy, sound and visual presentations should not mislead children about product or performance characteristics.

2. The presentation should not mislead children about benefits from use of the product. Such benefits may include, but are not limited to, the acquisition of strength, status, popularity, growth, proficiency and intelligence.

3. Claims should not unduly exploit a child's imagination. ... it should not create unattainable performance expectations nor exploit the younger child's difficulty in distinguishing between the real and the fanciful.

4. Advertisements should demonstrate the performance and use of a product in a way that can be duplicated by a child for whom the product is intended.

5. The advertisement should not mislead children about what is included in the initial purchase.

Please support Gore's message to Congress

2007-03-18T11:03:00.000-06:00

Gore will be testifying before the US Congress on Wed. March 21st. Show your support by signing this message to Congress.

Famous Atheists

2007-03-18T09:05:00.000-06:00

Remember Debbie Schlussel, the Ann Coulter wannabe that made such a ruckus on her Paula Zahn appearance? (part 1 ... part 2) Here are a couple of her gems, taken from her blog:

Look at famous atheists and what happened to them. Adam Gadahn a/k/a Azzam Al-Amriki--now a top Al-Qaeda video "personality"--was raised by his hippie Jewish father and equally bizarre gentile mother as an atheist. And look how he turned out.
...

I don't mind receiving the atheist hate mail, since I know that in a few years, many of these same people will either be Muslim extremists (redundant) or helping the country fall further in its fight against the creep of Islamic imposition on America . . . or both.

Can't you just feel how safe -- and superior -- that shell of ignorance makes her feel?

To be honest, I can see how it really can be difficult for an atheist fearing person to come up with good examples of atheists. Atheism isn't very obvious. If you're black, then anybody that can get a good look at you will probably be able to tell that you're black. Sometimes Jewish (as a race, not a religion) and homosexual people can be identified from visual clues or behavioral mannerisms. Everybody's heard of "gay-dar" right? But what about atheists?

Most belief-defined groups, by nature, lack visual indicators. You might have some luck spotting Hare Krishnas and Amish, but even those visual indicators are far from reliable. Other belief groups are even less so. If somebody looks Jewish (race), they might be Jewish (religion), but that's not always the case. And if somebody looks middle eastern, they might be Islamic, but that's not always the case either. Just like a Jew (religion) might not look Jewish (race), or a Muslim might not look middle eastern. So in America, by default, people assume you are one of the statistical majority: Christian. Not because you look particularly Christian. Just because most people are, and you don't look otherwise.

On one hand, this is particularly vexing for atheists that want to find other atheists. When you're a statistical minority, and you can't tell who else is in your minority, it can feel even smaller than it really is. But it also makes it difficult for theists to know who the atheists really are! And in Debbie's case, she could have used some better examples.

If you're ever talking with somebody that obviously has no idea how many wonderful examples of atheists there really are, here are a couple of resources that can give you plenty of ammo!

CelebAtheists.com is a good place to not only find names of famous atheists and agnostics, but also to read the quotes that reveal/prove those titles. When I'm feeling down, I like to visit this page and realize that I am indeed in good company.

I also just found this YouTube clip that helps defend atheists by pointing out many great atheists of past and present, as well as their contributions to the world. Enjoy!

Trickle-Up Atheism

2007-03-15T17:01:00.000-06:00

Atheism is only going to grow from here on out. Don't get the idea from my last post that I don't think we are on the move. We are. One day in the next hundred years, the average American will look around at the few, small religious groups left, and see nothing but cults. I don't think there will be a big fight to the finish, I just think that people are getting smarter, and getting smart leads to stronger reasoning skills and fewer irrational beliefs. The Institute for Humanist Studies reports that the number of nonreligious 18-25 year olds has risen from 11% to 20% in the last 20 years. Look at these other, encouraging findings:

Late last year, a Harris Poll, for the Financial Times, conducted a large survey on religious beliefs in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and the U.S. The U.S. was the most religious country, with 73 percent of respondents describing themselves as believers in "any form of God or any type of supreme being." (This figure is lower than many other surveys, but the totals include 6 percent who prefer not to say and 3 percent who don't know -- categories that other surveys often drop from their results.)

Italy wasn't far behind the U.S., with 62 percent believing in a god. In the other countries, believers in God are the minority: 48 percent of Spaniards, 41 percent of Germans, 35 percent of Britons and just 27 percent of the French believe in any form of a supreme being.

I don't think we need to make this a heated exchange. We should be the parent that calms the child down from an irrational temper tantrum with calm, reasonable words -- not by losing our own temper and bullying the fight out of them. The more rational thought we inspire into those that are already on the slippery slope, the more we are greasing up the slope.

Sam Harris has a new article in the LA Times today, in which he describes the spectrum of the religious as concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness. The moderate and liberal believers are the outer rings, and are standing between us and the maniacal fundamentalists and suicide bombers in the middle. Their existance protects and excuses the fundamentalists.

If we start with the moderates and liberals, even by ignoring the fundamentalists altogether, we are still eroding their support. The more religious liberals we get sliding down the slope, the more will deconvert into free thinkers. The stronger our numbers, the weaker theirs. Without the support of these liberals, and then the moderates, fundamentalists will eventually just go POOF in a cloud of logic.

I think this is a much more reasonable approach than going straight for the big fish. If we started with the fundamentalists, they would have a good chance of aligning all the fence-sitters against us. With a trickle-up approach, we can reduce their numbers first, and then tackle their strongest members with stronger numbers ourselves.

debate: our lot in life?

2007-03-14T11:48:00.000-06:00

I haven't revealed my atheism to anybody in a long time now. I'm "out" even though I have certain limitations. I won't go past saying "I'm not very religious" to my clients, and I'll just grin-and-bear-it to any of those fool "Do ya have the fear o' God in ya, boy?" questions I get from my wife's extended family. I don't see these as betraying my moral honor. It's just politics.

Going backward, I didn't even have a big "coming out" to anyone in college. My university, or at least the students that I knew, seemed to be about 40% atheist, 30% catholic, 10% muslim, and 20% various protestant varieties, wiccan, buddhist, etc. Nobody even blinked an eye at atheism there. This doesn't surprise me. In Mensa Magazine in 2002, Paul Bell published a meta-analysis of 43 different studies over the last 80 years. 39 of them (over 90%) found an inverse proportion between how much education a person has, versus how likely they are to hold any religious beliefs.

High school was very different. I was in the Bible Belt (a term coined by an atheist!) and shared a school with plenty of fundamentalists. I remember sometimes debating the existance of God -- and even the historical truth of the Noachian flood! -- during class.

Memory of those debates sticks in my mind like the memories of a good meal. And the debates that I know are still to come, like a party scheduled in the near future. Like I said, it's been a while since I've "come out" to anybody. I'm yearning for a good debate.

I feel that debate is the atheist's lot in life. It's usually not a vicious "You're gonna go to hell!" / "You're an insignificant speck in the universe!" debate. Much of the time it's almost more of an interview -- the point being to satisfy the curiosity of someone that has maybe never met an atheist before. We get a chance to clear up that atheists aren't devil worshippers, and point out a few problems we have with religion. Maybe point out a few famous atheists they might recognize, so they won't think we're all Al-Qaeda terrorists. It's sometimes only a debate in the sense that you are on two different sides of a very high fence, and are discussing the property lines. Not about moving it, just about the line itself.

Until we're more prevalent, we're a curiosity. In the current religious climate (at least, in the U.S.), we especially need to satisfy that curiosity in a way that makes us appear harmless. For these casual debate/discussions, I don't think our goal should be deconversion, but indifference.

I loved Hemant's story about his appearance on the christian talk show. What really struck me was this part:

One Christian audience member came up to me afterwards and said I had changed his views on atheists – we weren’t so bad after all – which was one of the nicest things I could’ve heard. That was sweet.

I think that's what we should be going for right now. Make it known that we are not devil worshippers. We're not devoid of morals. We're not the bad guys. We're just not anything to get your magic underwear in knots over.

And maybe, just maybe, we can get them to start thinking a little more on their own.

Hold that Parkinson's study, there are Gays out there!

2007-03-10T23:09:00.000-06:00

Another juicy link from Pharyngula! PZ discusses an article by an evangelical named Dr. Albert Mohler, who is a president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and hosts The Albert Mohler radio program.

His bio mentions that Time.com calls him the "reigning intellectual of the evangelical movement in the U.S.," from this article. It isn't about Mohler so much as it is an interview with him about missionary work in Iraq. In it, he states his view that "America is not a Christian nation; it's a mission field." In other words, it's not a Christian nation yet, but he's working on it. Great.

Mohler's new article discusses homosexuality and whether or not it can be screened before birth, and potentially "fixed" with hormone treatment

If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin.

So hold on just a second there, you're willing to experiment and develop prenatal therapy on fetuses for the goal of reducing "homosexual sins" but you think that trying to cure spinal cord injuries or Parkinson's disease with stem cell research threatens human dignity itself?

If a human embryo can be turned into mere material for medical research, every human life is discounted.

Where does he draw the line? Are human embryos more precious than fetuses? He criticizes the concept of "designer babies" but argues:

How can they now complain if women decide to abort fetuses identified as homosexual?

Is homosexuality worse than paralysis or Parkinson's disease? Mohler's website contains plenty of comments about the 'evils' of homosexuality:

We must talk honestly about what homosexuality is, and why God has condemned this sin as an abomination in His sight. Courage is far too rare in many Christian circles. This explains the surrender of so many denominations, seminaries, and churches to the homosexual agenda.

If the evangelicals are looking for a "gay gene," we should be looking for the "evangelical nutjob gene." Or maybe the "gullibility to religious dogma gene." They want to fix fetuses to get rid of the "homosexual agenda?" Fine, but let's do it by getting rid of genes that lead to hateful intolerance.

Religious Violence and the Ghost of Authority

2007-03-09T18:03:00.000-06:00

Kill the Afterlife brought my attention to a study by the University of Michigan. The researchers compared the aggressiveness of students from two universities, Brigham Young (99% of which believed in God and the Bible) and Vrije Universiteit (in Amsterdam) (50% believe in God, 27% believe in the Bible). The aggressive behavior was measured after the students were read an obscure, but violent, passage from the bible. Half (from each school) were told it was a bible verse, and half that it was from a parchment found in an archaeological dig. Half of each group was also read this passage:

"The Lord commanded Israel to take arms against their brothers and chasten them before the LORD."

The result was more aggression from students that had known the obscure passage was from the bible, and more aggression from students that had been read the biblical call to arms. Both universities saw similar results, even among Vrije's non-believers.

Two questions came up immediately in my thoughts. First, why were non-believers swayed by the biblical sources? I can think of a couple of possibilities. To start with, who's to say that the students that were godless at the time of the study didn't grow up in a church environment? 'Atheist' doesn't mean you weren't indoctrinated into religion as a child.

The strength of a belief in something can carry even further than the belief itself. Here is a thought experiment: imagine the strictest teacher you've ever had, approaching you years after they ever had any real authority over you. They level their eyes at you and bark out your name in that familiar way. "We need to take a trip to the principle's office right now." Even though the phrase "principle's office" has no real meaning in your life now, your pulse might quicken anyway. I know mine would. It is a learned response to a specific stimulus, reappearing like an immune response to a long-absent disease.

In the same way, a response to biblical authority -- if you have ever had it -- can recur even if you no longer believe it has a divine authority.

But there is also the social impact that religion has on everybody, even atheists. As an atheist, can you really say that when you walk into a church, it feels like any other building you've ever been in? No, it feels different. There are strong associations that society, as a whole, grants to these buildings. Maybe if atheists and theists were on slightly more even ground, that might not be the case. But in the US, at least, theists outnumber us greatly. Their religion has an effect on us similar to how rapids might effect a small midstream pebble. The pebble is very different from the larger rocks in the river, but the same water that is tossed and turned by the larger rocks can toss and turn the pebble.

One obvious analogy to this is how atheists are being oppressed with dollar bills and pledges that hold reverent a god that we do not accept. We're caught in the currents of religion. This happens on emotional levels too. One of the bigger problems facing atheism today is the fact that we atheists are too accepting of our fate. Why did it take us 50 years to take the religious pledge of allegiance to the Supreme Court? We spent so much time just going with the flow that we now look like we're "on the offensive" simply because we finally decided we were tired of being drug along by the populist current.

The second interesting question that I had was a matter of causality. This study hasn't had time to be corroborated, so it's just one set of data. One study I remember hearing about in the 90s showed that couples that live together before marriage are more likely to get divorced. But does this mean that living together before marriage can lead to divorce, or that the people that tend towards divorce also tend towards living together before marriage. Or maybe there is a third element altogether, that is independently causing the first two?

This study might show that a belief in God can lead to more aggressive behavior. Or it might mean that aggressive people tend to be religious! There is no way of knowing without further study, and there are no guarantees even then. There is plenty of evidence of both in this world. The Old Testiment reads like a Rambo movie. And there are plenty of criminals that "find God" in prison. Maybe these concepts just naturally gravitate to each other.

Either way, I want to see more research about this. I would love to see this repeated with enough data sets that one could make a map of religion/aggression hot zones.

Congress -- more nontheists or not?

2007-03-06T22:08:00.000-06:00

In response to my previous post, where I mention the upcoming announcement of a nontheist in Congress, Naomi from God is for Suckers! mentioned that she expected there could be more that are just staying in the closet. Naomi has a great post on GifS that discusses the religious anomalies in Congress. I started off writing a responding comment, but I thought it was interesting enough for a full post.

Congress is no stranger to statistical anomalies. After all, there are only 16 female senators out of 100 people. But Naomi's post also shows interesting differences in religious preference in Congress vs. the real world. For instance, the Jewish representation in Congress is more than six times larger than what is seen in the nationwide statistics. The Episcopalian representation is more than four times normal, and Presbyterian representation is three times normal. While the 'unaffiliated' statistic is nearly 13 times smaller than the national percentage.

Well, all those boosted groups had to get their numbers from somewhere.

But why so few from the 'unaffiliated' group? I think it's group psychology. If someone running for Congress says they are Catholic, all the Catholics at the polls will at least be able to say, "That candidate is one of us!" This gives the candidate extra compassion for their faults, and greater empathy for their drives. No matter what group the candidate falls into, there is probably going to some kind of boost among their religious brethren.

But what if a candidate is listed as 'unaffiliated'? That, almost by definition, means they are in no group at all. True, they might find some boost among those that also consider themselves unaffiliated, but that's a group that is lacking an official title. It's the same difference as between a Club and a group of friends. Remember your childhood -- what was the first thing that happened after a group of friends starts a club? Come up with a name, of course! Without looking into this any further, it would almost seem more beneficial for a candidate to use a label like Atheist, Agnostic, Pantheist, or Humanist -- as long as it's not the nebulous 'unaffiliated.'

But there are also supergroups. Naomi's list can also be read as 'affiliated' vs 'unaffiliated' -- with an imbalance of 98.9% against! Different denominations can be divisive amongst themselves, but they all have a god, and that's a pretty thick line to draw in the sand. Group psychology will also create outcasts. 'Unaffiliated' can technically mean "religious, but without preference of a particular denomination." 'Atheist' just flat out puts you in the doghouse.

So, back to the question -- are there more nontheists in Congress? I've seen various statistics but they seem to center around 1%-3% of the US population actively calls themselves atheist. So for a group of 535 Americans, one could expect for somewhere between 5 and 16 of them to be atheist. Not just nontheist, but Atheist with a capital 'A.'

I'm about as sure that there aren't 16 atheists in Congress as I am that there is not a god.

Oh, part of it is just me being cynical and feeling isolated and unrepresented. But I also think that the same group psychology that would result in unity or discrimination in a vote, would also reveal itself in the grooming of a candidate that happens before the vote. If a candidate could somehow go from an unknown to a honest contender without any public support, things might be different. But there are a lot of people that go into a candidacy, and someone needs a lot of group support before running for office.

Julia Sweeney, Congress, and an XBox

2007-03-06T02:18:00.000-06:00

Earlier today I found a link to a short video clip of Julia Sweeney performing a portion of her Letting Go of God show for the TED conference. I had heard an interview with Julia on the Freethought Radio podcast, but had never heard any of her show. It was terrific! I found out that her entire show was also available on Audible.

As it happens, my wife recently started a subscription to Audible (in order to download The Secret as audiobook -- more on that later, I promise). So a few clicks later and I had purchased the Letting Go of God audiobook/reading. I'm nearly halfway through and have been really enjoying it.

Another exciting bit of news from today is that a (not yet identified) congressman is going to come out of The Other Closet in an announcement next Monday, to become the first openly nontheistic congressman. Jesse Ventura has made comments that might indicate that he is also a nontheist, but from Governor to Congressman is a step in the right direction. I can't wait to find out who this is.

And finally, on a personal note, I won an XBox 360 today! I'm not a huge gamer, even though I've been enjoying my Wii. I always figured a 360 (and certainly a PS3) were out the realm of possibility just from a price perspective. But hey, if they're just gonna give me one.... I submitted a few of my PowerShell scripts to Microsoft for a promotional contest they were holding. There would be a drawing in each of several categories, with the prizes ranging from an XBox 360 (core) for each category, to any of several TShirt prizes.

The contest was over in December, and the expected announcement date came and went in mid-January, and I didn't hear anything and their website hasn't been updated since the contest was over. So I'd given up weeks ago. But I got FOUR emails from Microsoft today, and I had won the top prize for one category, and the TShirt prize in three others! Wow!

I've never won 'the big prize' in anything before, and I've never won anything in a drawing, period. This is very exciting!

My Atheist Self

2007-03-04T01:49:00.000-06:00

All blogs have their beginning. Even blogs that don't live past the first post start somewhere. So, despite the longevity of this blog being a complete unknown, here I go.

With atheist blogs in particular, the traditional first post is the "giving up God" story or the "coming out" story. Almost in the same way that the first issue of every superhero comic must deal with that hero's story of origin. Are we the real life superheros? I look at my kids, and I know that one of these days they're going to realize that there are two sides to religion. You don't have to believe. And if they choose the rational truth over the anesthetic lies, then yes. I will feel like a real life superhero.

My own atheism probably didn't inspire anybody. My parents raised me in a Unitarian Universalist church, although they were very non-specific about their religion. More recently, I've determined that my father is an agnostic and my mother is a pantheist. They both very supportive of me being a full-out atheist.

There was never really a time in my life that I wasn't an atheist. But I would say that there were three pivotal moments that led me to realize that is what I was.

The first moment was one day when I was four (I think it was about four). Some kids at school (I went to a Montessori preschool for a couple of years before I started first grade, and this was during Montessori) had mentioned God, and I had no idea what they were talking about. I asked my parents about it, and my dad responded with, "Well, some people believe...." It was the "some people" that caught my attention. It meant that it was optional. It was not required. It wasn't universal.

A couple of years later, another piece of the puzzle fell into place. I read a lot, and was an advanced reader for my age. One of my favorite books was D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. What really interested me was that nobody believed in Zeus anymore. At some point, people had stopped believing in the Greek gods, and started believing in God. So, what religion was next? Religion appeared to be evolving along with civilization. Which meant that it was only 'true' relative to the time of its believers. Which meant that mankind generations in the future might not -- or probably won't -- believe in the religion we have today.

At this point I was solidly atheist, although I was really hesitant to ever say so in front of anybody but my parents. But I was definitely not happy about this God thing. I remember once refusing to join the soccer team at the Boys Club because the membership form included an oath to God. I threw a childish temper tantrum at the time, but I wish I could go back and give that kid a big pat on the back just for the principle of it. I hope my kids will be aware enough to know how wrong it is to force an eight year old to sign an oath to God before they can be part of the team.

About the only public show of atheism I had in me at this point was that I refused to say the pledge of allegiance. And in certain settings, to not bow my head or close my eyes during a group prayer. It wasn't until fifth grade that I started telling my friends -- only when they asked, mind you -- that I was agnostic. I felt that 'agnostic' softened the blow. I still flabbergasted the other bible-belt children, but I wasn't too far from fitting in that they really excluded me. (At least, not for my religion. I was enough of a geek even then that they probably figured my religion was just one more oddity.)

The third and final moment happened during late high school. I was finally growing some self-confidence, and it was manifesting in my being more open about my beliefs. I was even occasionally bold enough to debate other students about the existence of God. I was THE science geek of my grade, which gave me a pretty good foundation of knowledge to pull from, for a high-schooler. But what happened that really made a difference to me, is that I switched from calling myself an agnostic to calling myself an atheist. I had known for some time that I was using the term agnostic to avoid the really scary discrimination and distrust that comes with the term atheist. But now I was ready to do something about it. I decided -- once-and-for-all, as it were -- that I would no longer be so meek as to lie about who and what I was just because I was afraid of the response of other people.

This was huge. My self confidence went through the roof, and I began what a theist would call a spiritual journey. I suppose I should call it a rational journey. I really began to explore the notion of being atheist. And I became proud of it. College only bolstered this. My college was probably 30%-40% atheist, which helped me feel like one of the crowd. (it was maybe another 30%-40% catholic, and the rest scattered among a wide variety of denominations).

Unfortunately, these days I am finding myself much more withdrawn. I feel more limitations. I have clients. Family. I am more aware -- and more incensed -- over issues such as God in our pledge, the separation of church and state, and polls that determine atheists to be the least trusted minority. I'm feeling much more oppressed than I did six or seven years ago. I feel like a minority. I am also feeling very much alone. I work at home, and rarely leave the house. I need a way to speak to others like me. I need to find my voice and become that self-confident atheist once again.

So while I am keeping my atheism very low key to strangers and clients, I am also trying to find a way to speak to others as an atheist. Which is this blog. This is my Atheist Self.