Atheist groups in less religious areas

Last night I attended a planning meeting for the Secular Student Union at the University of Washington. It’s equivalent to the group I started at Purdue, and also an affiliate of the Secular Student Alliance. What was interesting to me, as a Board member of the SSA, was how little regular members they had attending meetings.

You would think a liberal area like Seattle would produce way more members than an area like West Lafayette, Indiana. And obviously there are many variables that could contribute to this issue – leadership differences, advertising, event planning… But this is a trend I’ve seen talking to lots of student groups across the country. It makes sense when you think about it: When your non-theism is in the majority, or at the very least when no one cares about it, there’s less incentive to have a club.

In Indiana, clubs like the Society of Non-Theists are the one thing people have keeping them sane from the surrounding area. It’s the only place you can be completely open, safe, and accepted. Seattle isn’t a religious area, so there’s no reason to stand on the rooftops shouting about atheism.

Or is there? I personally think so. Yes, community was one of our main goals at SNT, but it wasn’t the only goal. At UW, you may not need a club to find friends, but you can still use it for volunteering, intellectual discussion, and debates about more controversial issues. For example, many people in the area may not be religious, but you can show how important it is to speak up for your secularism. You can have events educating people about the Catholic Church’s stance on condoms, or how some Islamic beliefs interact with free speech.

What do you think? Do secular groups still serve a purpose in less religious areas? Or is our job here already complete?

Off to lab safety training!

This morning is the mandatory lab safety training new graduate students have to go through. I probably shouldn’t be excited, since I heard this is actually just a boring lecture. But we do get to use a fire extinguisher at the end, so I’m holding out for that bit of excitement.

But we all know the cool part about working in laboratories is the potential for disaster, right? I mean, who didn’t go to chemistry lab secretly wishing something would explode? Be honest.

What’s your best lab disaster story?

Mine actually happened when I was teaching, rather than as a student. We were using Bunsen burners and the rubber tubing connecting the Bunsen burner to the gas source caught on fire. The professor, other TA, and I all just sort of stared at it dumbfounded for a couple seconds before one of us thought to just turn off the gas. Molten rubber is not a nice smell.

Watch out! I'm susceptible to madness!

Biologists are the most common type of mad scientists in books, movies, and television in the last two hundred years. I never thought of starting my PhD in genetics as heading toward the dark side, but I may have to rethink that. I’ll try not to create any horrific chimeras or crazy viruses during my lab rotations.

Though it makes sense, really. Biology is obviously the coolest scientific field, so we have more potential for fiction novels. Just think about it. What would a mad astronomer do? Look at stars maniacally? Yeah, biologists totally trump that.

(Via Skepchick)

A new boobquake song?

It’s called Boys Love Earthquakes by Nichole Alden. I think it has to be about boobquake, but it’s not explicitly clarified anywhere. Here are some of the lyrics:

Cover your head
Beauty must hide
Silence your lips
Keeping Inside
Far too tempting to uncover what they might
Beautiful girl, this submission isn’t right

Lower your head
Body must bow
Purity gives excuse to disavow
Your defiance will devour and deny
Beautiful girl, there’s no reason to comply

Don’t shake, shake, shake
They don’t allow
Don’t shake, shake, shake
It’s all your fault now

It’s not exactly my type of music, but I like the lyrics. If it’s not officially about boobquake, I think it definitely could be.

Boys Love Earthquakes by Nichole ALDEN

(Via Common Sense Atheism)

Next item on the gay agenda

Oh Indiana. And to think this happened in one of our biggest, most liberal (relatively) cities.

This is what they were after: a mulitcolored cupcake to celebrate “National Coming Out Day” next month; a rainbow confection to honor the diversity on the campus of IUPUI. But the student who had the order placed at Just Cookies was told no. […]

“Look around, we don’t have cupcakes,” said owner Lilly Stockton.

Stockton said she talked to someone who did ask for rainbow cookies but couldn’t accommodate the order.

Stockton: “I don’t have enough colors to do that.”

Reporter: “Not enough colors, not because you didn’t like what they stood for?”

Stockton: “She didn’t tell me what it was for.”

Oh, wait, that sounds like a reasonable excuse. I’m sure other people from the store would back her up.

Then we talked to her husband David, who gradually made it clear that there was an earlier order… and yes, the customer was refused.

“I explained we’re a family-run business, we have two young, impressionable daughters and we thought maybe it was best not to do that,” said co-owner David Stockton.

Nevermind.

To quote one of my fellow grad students: “First cupcakes, then THE WORLD!”

Who knew gays were like CO2?

Looks like Global Warming is in need of a scientific update:

Clerics in the South Pacific have fingered the key cause of climate change – homosexuals.

The revelation came at a conference at the University of the South Pacific considering the implications of Climate Change and Creativity.

Academics were apparently thrown off their consideration of “Arts in the Age of Global Warming” and “Ecology in Poetry / Poetry in Ecology” by reports of Church Ministers who maintained that climate change in Samoa are clearly attributable to to homosexuals.

Come on, that’s preposterous. How in the world do gays cause climate change? I mean…

…wait a second.

GBLT.

Global Bolstering of Lavalike Temperatures.

Oh my god.

An ingenious plan, gay agenda. An ingenious plan.

Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better Project”

Last week an Indiana teen committed suicide thanks to merciless anti-gay bullying at his school. It stings that it’s from my home state, but it hurts more that this isn’t shocking. Gay teens are four times more likely to commit suicide, especially if they don’t live in urban areas. Which is why Dan Savage thought of this wonderful project:

I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren’t allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don’t bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don’t have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

So here’s what you can do, GBVWS: Make a video. Tell them it gets better. […]

Today we have the power to give these kids hope. We have the tools to reach out to them and tell our stories and let them know that it does get better. Online support groups are great, GLSEN does amazing work, the Trevor Project is invaluable. But many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them what our lives are like. Let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them.

I faced a lot of anti-gay teasing in middle school and high school even though I was straight. Because, dontcha know, anyone who’s friends with gay people must themselves be gay. I can’t imagine how bad it would have been if I actually was a lesbian, or if I hadn’t had boyfriends. Not to mention the fact that our principal fought tooth an nail against us forming a Gay Straight Alliance my senior year. Heaven forbid we form a safe community for harassed students.

If you’re a GLBT adult, please consider uploading your own video and submitting it by emailing Dan (mail (at) savagelove (dot) net). This may be our best chance to reach kids who need to hear that life is worth living, yes, even if you’re gay.

Another example of feminist distrust of science: Vaccinations

Not all feminists distrust science, but it’s a common enough theme that it’s become a major pet peeve of mine. I ran into another example reading a blogger I usually love, Lena Chen (who’s also one of More Magazine’s up and coming young feminists). So Lena, I apologize ahead of time for making an example out of you, but this issue is very important.

One of Lena’s readers commented that vaccination seemed a lot like circumcision in that it lacked consent, and asked for Lena’s opinion. Here’s the bulk of her post:

I’m against mandatory vaccinations, but that doesn’t mean that I’m against vaccinations. […] Invasive or not, vaccinations are something that individuals should be able to decide on themselves. Requiring them means that the government is essentially making health decisions for its citizens, without taking into account what they (or their parents) may want. (Most girls getting the vaccine are at an age when they can be informed about the benefits and risks of the procedure.) I got the HPV vaccine myself, and I’d recommend it to anyone, but I would never be able to justify mandating it, because I value personal freedom and think that choice should be left up to the patient.

And while, of course, it makes sense — in theory — to say that a modicum of personal freedom is a rather minor sacrifice for the “greater good”, it’s not like this line of reasoning hasn’t been abused in the past. Women — especially women of color and poor women — have more than just cause to be wary of a medical establishment that has historically profited from the coercion of marginalized groups. Forced sterilization of Black women threatened with the loss of welfare benefits, forced sterilization of individuals deemed “mentally defective”, electroshock aversion therapy to cure homosexuality … all of these things occurred in this country in the last fifty years. Frankly, I could give less of a damn about “public health” if it means that I get to live in a slightly more civilized society where no one is told what to do with their bodies anymore.

I commented:

Sorry, but I’m going to have to disagree. The way vaccinations work is through herd immunity. If the vast majority of people don’t get vaccinated, it puts those who can’t get vaccinated for medical reasons (newborns, the elderly, immunocompromised individuals) at even higher risk. If the government didn’t require vaccinations, they would be effectively worthless.

Thanks to vaccination fear mongering by people like Jenny McCarthy and people who make it into a personal freedom issue instead of a scientific issue, we’ve seen a sharp rise in diseases that were thought to have been eradicated. See: Whooping cough in California.

This isn’t some nebulous “for the greater good” ideology like forced sterilizations. The mechanics of herd immunity are pretty cut and dry.

Lena replied:

I think that one can definitely make a case for vaccinations being a good thing that benefits society and people’s health, which is why I don’t see a lot of folks opting out of vaccinations just because they’re no longer mandatory. I do think that a lot of anti-vaccination advocates spout arguments that sound like conspiracy theories (I’ve even seen 9/11 comparisons made), but I have to agree that there’s no reason why the government should be able to make decisions about their citizens’ bodies. This isn’t even something I would necessarily call fear-mongering, since there’s a historical precedence for this concern.

Me:

Except that people do opt out of vaccinations when they’re not mandatory. That’s precisely the reason why we’ve seen a sudden whooping cough epidemic. This is especially true when you have people like Jenny McCarthy going around lying about how vaccines are dangerous and cause autism. Not to mention that she’s well publicized by people like Oprah.

To say the government should not be able to make decisions about their citizen’s bodies is nice in theory, but ludicrous in practice. Do we want disease epidemics spreading across the country? Do we want children dying of genetic disorders that could have easily been treated if tested at birth? Do we want food and drugs we put into our bodies to become dangerous because the government shouldn’t regulate what’s safe or not?

There’s a point where historical precedence becomes antiquated distrust for science in general. We shouldn’t forget the past, but we shouldn’t be paralyzed by it either.

This could be worse. She obviously accepts that vaccine works and rejects the completely anti-science loonies. But at the same time, this is a perfect example of when ideology, specifically liberal and feminist ideology, supplants science and reason. And I say that as a liberal feminist. People have abused science in the past, but that doesn’t mean science itself is forever evil. It’s something that needs to be closely scrutinized, not ignored.

From my personal experience, I have a hypotheses as to why you see this sort of distrust in the feminist community. So many vocal feminist aren’t scientists by training, but rather come from liberal arts educations like English, Political Science, Sociology, or Woman’s studies. And when you consider most liberal arts majors probably only had to take one or two introductory science classes in college, it’s understandable why they might not fully grasp how vaccinations are effective or why not all evolutionary psychology is bunk (though some is). If I tried to give my opinion about economics based on one class I took senior year of high school, I’m sure I’d be wrong about a lot of things.

Now, plenty of scientists are feminists – we sort of have to be in a traditionally male dominated field – but there’s usually not much overlap between our studies and our feminism. That is, a political scientist can use their expertise to focus on women’s issues, but a chemist can’t really weave feminist philosophy into her next paper. Since we have less overlap, we can get busy in our geeky scientific jobs and forget to be vocal about other issues we care about. That’s why I personally try to be an outspoken scientific voice for feminism whenever I can.

And that’s why I’m going to give a damn about about public health – because it means I get to live in a civilized society, instead of dying from preventable whooping cough, measles, rubella, or polio.