Creator of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” forced to change identity for safety

Many student groups participated in “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” without too much trouble. Yes, there was controversy and disagreement, but no real threats. On the other hand, Molly Norris, the cartoonist and creator of “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” hasn’t been so lucky:

But on the insistence of top security specialists at the FBI, she is, as they put it, “going ghost”: moving, changing her name, and essentially wiping away her identity. She will no longer be publishing cartoons in our paper or in City Arts magazine, where she has been a regular contributor. She is, in effect, being put into a witness-protection program—except, as she notes, without the government picking up the tab. It’s all because of the appalling fatwa issued against her this summer, following her infamous “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day” cartoon.

People, this is why standing up against ridiculous religious beliefs is so important. Molly Norris suggested people draw a cartoon, and she now has to change her whole life so she won’t be murdered.

A religion that reacts in such a way does not deserve respect or politeness. People have every right to believe whatever nonsense they want, but they do not have the right to force those beliefs on others. Muslims should not expect everyone to refrain from drawing Mohammed just because they don’t want to. Hindus should not expect everyone to stop eating beef. Jews should not expect people to stop working on the sabbath. Catholics should not expect people to treat their crackers like they’re the body of Jesus.

Now, I don’t go out looking to start confrontations, so I’m polite to an extent. If my Jewish friend is coming over for dinner, I’ll take their dietary needs into consideration. But the second Jews start threatening and murdering human beings for eating pork, I will not blink an eye before organizing a national Bacon Week.

I’m always asked why atheists need to be so organized if they’re not a religion. Well, this is why. I want to live my life without being policed by religions I don’t believe in. And if I have to choose between potentially offending someone vs. oppression and bodily harm, I’m going to lean toward the option of pissing people off.

Important! Meetup date change

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m going to have to change the date of our meetup to Sunday the 19th. Same time and place. Apparently there’s some new grad student social event on Friday that I’m expected to attend that I just found out about. Sorry again for the confusion and getting your hopes up if you could attend Friday but not Sunday.

If it’s any consolation, Sunday is Talk Like a Pirate Day. The Seamonster Lounge seems like a very appropriate place to celebrate this Pastafarian holiday with a bunch of heathens.

Seattle meet up this Sunday!

It looks like Friday the 17th will be the best day to have a little Blag Hag Seattle meetup for your schedules and for mine. Gah, change of plans, sorry! Make that Sunday the 19th. Here are the details:

Sunday, September 19th
6:30 pm until whenever
Seamonster Lounge
2202 N 45th St (in Wallingford)

I already found the place while wandering around Wallingford, so I know I won’t get lost, yay! Feel free to show up later if you want.

If you’re pretty sure you’re coming, please let me know and indicate if you’re bringing anyone else. Just need to know how many chairs to save. Can’t wait to see you guys!

Yet another example of why I left Indiana

A Geocentrism conference? Really?I saw this story floating around and wasn’t going to comment on it, but then I found out the conference is being held in South Bend, Indiana. Oh, Indiana. This is why I usually tell people I’m from Chicago instead (my home town is a Chicago suburb in Indiana, I swear!).

Phil Plait has an excellent summary of why Geocentrism is wrong over at Bad Astronomy, including this particularly insightful bit:

Look, I’m human: I say “The Sun rose in the east today”, and not “the rotation of the Earth relative to the rest of the Universe carried me around to a geometric vantage point where the horizon as seen from my location dropped below the Sun’s apparent position in space.” To us, sitting here on the surface of a planet, geocentrism is a perfectly valid frame of reference. Heck, astronomers use it all the time to point our telescopes. We map the sky using a projected latitude and longitude, and we talk about things rising and setting. That’s not only natural, but a very easy way to do those sorts of things. In that case, thinking geocentrically makes sense.

However, as soon as you want to send a space probe to another planet, geocentrism becomes cumbersome. In that case, it’s far easier to use the Sun as the center of the Universe and measure the rotating and revolving Earth as just another planet. The math works out better, and in fact it makes more common sense.

However, this frame of reference, called heliocentrism, still is not the best frame for everything. Astronomers who study other galaxies use a galactic coordinate system based on our Milky Way galaxy, and the Sun is just another star inside it. Call it galactocentrism, if you want, and it’s just as useful as geo– or heliocentrism in its limited way. And none of those systems work if I want to know turn-by-turn directions while driving; in that case I use a carcentric system (specifically a Volvocentric one).

You use coordinate systems depending on what you need.

So really, there is no one true center to anything. I suppose you could say the Universe is polycentric, or more realistically acentric. You picks your frame of reference and you takes your chances.

…That’s where Geocentrism trips up. Note the upper case G there; I use that to distinguish it from little-g geocentrism, which is just another frame of reference among many. Capital-G Geocentrism is the belief that geocentrism is the only frame, the real one.

I never thought about it that way! Thanks, Phil!

Oh no, they already know I’m here!

I haven’t even been in Seattle for 48 hours, and this is what I just found on the steps leading up to my place:Man, Christians are quick.

Though as I went back to my car to get more groceries, I noticed all the houses had this on their steps. I still like pretending that I’m some infamous evil atheist worth personally targeting with silly evangelizing.

Oh, and the back? Just the same old “Why you should accept Jesus into your heart stuff.” Nothing new to report on there.

This is the soap my landlord gave to me

I found this very amusing when I moved in:
Hey, I’m just happy I have soap!

My landlord is super nice, though it is a bit amusing seeing my car with a Darwin fish parked right by his car with a Jesus fish. I pray to the FSM that this will not be a source of blogging material over the next year or so. I want to live in my Garden Gnome Cave in peace.

Help is no longer needed in escaping Indiana

Because I made it to Seattle, woooooo!

Somehow Mark and I survived the drive without going too insane. The first day we drove for 15 hours and stopped in Wall, South Dakota. I swear we just happened to end up there when it got dark – we did not stop because of the tourist trap known as Wall Drug. Though since a bunch of my twitter followers insisted that it was hilariously bad, we checked it out. Sorry guys, but it was not worth the ten minutes :P

The second day we drove for 14 hours and stopped at Mt. Rushmore, which was a much nicer stop. Pretty cool, though we didn’t stay for long. We spent the night is Missoula, Montana and were greatly impressed that you can apparently get alcoholic beverages for takeout at restaurants.

The third day we only had to drive 6 hours, but it was by far the worst. South Dakota and Montana were actually pretty beautiful. Idaho was beautiful as well, since we were basically driving through cloud filled mountains, which we don’t exactly have in Indiana. Hell, I get excited when I see a hill. Or a patch of land without corn.

But man, Eastern Washington was so insanely boring. It actually reminded me a lot of the desert grasslands in Arizona where I do field research, but just a lot uglier. And then the last couple hours are a horrible combination of city traffic and mountains, so I felt like I was going to die. But I made it!

My apartment is super nice. I lucked out because I bought it from craiglist based on a couple of photos and talking to the landlord on the phone. It’s a lot more spacious than I expected, and I have more storage space than I have stuff to fill it with. It feels a bit barren at the moment, but I’m sure that’ll change soon enough. Oh, and the entrance is adorable, since it’s a basement apartment:
I feel like I’m living in the Secret Garden. …Or that I’m some sort of garden troll, whatever.

I am so exhausted. The combination of 35 hours of driving and sleeping on an air mattress until my bed arrives is not very relaxing. Not to mention I’m unpacking and buying various apartment necessities that I either couldn’t bring or never had. I still need to go grocery shopping, since this is what my refrigerator currently looks like:
I can think of no more appropriate way to kick off grad school than an fridge that’s empty except for a six pack of beer. Hurray college.

New horror novel, complete with a crisis of faith!

No, the crisis of faith isn’t supposed to be the horrifying part. It’s a murder mystery called The Faithful that’s coming out October 1:
About the book:

Conflicted with his faith in God and the hypocrisy of the church, Aidan, an assistant pastor, is already a spiritual battleground. When he learns that his ex-fiancee was murdered in a possibly demonic ritual, he finds himself catapulted into an even deeper fight. Tormented by demonic threats and haunted spirits in the afterlife, Aidan becomes a medium that will hold the key to solving this murder mystery. As Catholic priests, paranormal investigators and rogue law enforcement seek Aidan out, readers both secular and religious will find that the Faithful tears at the emotions and doubts of humankind.

About the author:

Jonathan Weyer is a campus minister at Ohio State University and is ordained in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. He is the founder of The Thomas Society, a student-led ministry dedicated to answering questions from skeptics, doubters, agnostics, and atheists. Jonathan is also the only Christian minister to have been added to the Secular Student Alliance speaker’s bureau. During the transition from church to campus ministry, Jonathan wrote the Faithful, combining his love of scary stories and his experience with doubters. He lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife Wendy, three kids, and a crazy cat.

For the sake of full disclosure, you should know that Jon and I are friends. Jen friends with a minister?! Shocking, I know. I haven’t read the book yet, but if it’s half as engaging as Jon is in person, it’ll be wonderful. I’m sure his constant exposure to us crazy atheists will help him handle the “crisis of faith” in a non-cheesy way… though I have a sneaking suspicion the pastor will see the light. ;)

And hell, if you can’t plug your friend’s book on your own blog, what’s a blog good for?

Jon was nice enough to share a more religious focused passage with us. Blag Hag exclusive material, woo!

I shrugged, “Yeah, you’re right. Natural, I guess. But, first, let me ask you a question.”

She raised her eyebrow at me as took a sip of her ginger ale. “Ask away, preacher.”

“What do you believe?”

“About God? I guess I believe there is one.”

“What does that mean?” I asked, folding my arms across my body, taking my “I’m going to teach” position.

“Well, I guess I’m not sure. I mean, I was raised Catholic, but I don’t go to Mass much anymore. I don’t hold to most of what the church teaches.”

“Doesn’t that usually go with being an American Catholic?” I asked, smirking a bit.

“True,” Jennifer said. “I guess I have my own religion. You know, I believe in God and spirituality. I’m spiritual, but not religious.”

“Okay, let me stop you there. What does that mean, spiritual but not religious?”

She stared out the window, watching the Gallery Hop crowd pass by our table.

“You know, I have never really thought about it. I guess it means acknowledging God, being thankful, nice to people, helping in the community and all that. I guess a little praying gets thrown in there too, especially on some of the cases I have to investigate.”

“Okay, so this God you pray to, what is He or She like? Can you describe this entity?”

“Well, no, I guess it’s more of a feeling.”

“Exactly. Why do you need God to be a good person, to be nice and all that? You don’t.”

She folded her arms across her chest.

“So, who says what’s nice? Someone has to enforce the law.”

“So, God is a universal cop? That’s comforting.” I tried to keep the scorn out of my voice.

“No, I mean, laws come from somewhere right?”

“Sure. Society. It’s in the best interests of society for laws to be made.”

She slowly nodded her head. “I see what you’re saying, but I don’t buy it.”

“But what do you buy? This God you can’t define other than good feelings or ‘facts’ that you can’t prove?” I had leaned in close, far enough that our faces were almost touching.

Jennifer backed away, slowly nodding her head. “I guess, but I have hard time believing there isn’t something out there.”

“Like what? It could be anything, as Dawkins says. It could be a flying spaghetti monster. You don’t know.”

“True, I guess.”

“I suppose I don’t believe in God anymore because I see no other alternative,” I said. “I think the whole vague, spirituality thing is a crock, excuse me. Either believe in God, do what he says, or don’t. Why try to have both? It’s just hypocritical holding on to the notion of God without any of the responsibilities.”

You can pre-order a copy of The Faithful here.

Who do I blog like?

This is a fun little website that analyzes the text of a blog. Here’s mine:

“blaghag.com is probably written by a female somewhere between 26-35 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time.”

Hey, not bad! I’m a 22 year old female, though I can see how my writing seems a tad more mature. And that happy to ranty ratio seems about right.

I wonder if this works well for other blogs?

“friendlyatheist.com is probably written by a female somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is personal and upset most of the time.”

Oh, erm. …Never mind.