Coming out Atheist: Greta’s collecting stories

Greta Christina, writer extraordinaire and sometimes conscience of the atheist community, is collecting testimonials for a new book project she’s working on:

I’m writing a new book — a how-to guide about coming out atheist. And I need your stories, and your advice.

IMPORTANT: Please read this entire post before commenting! I’m looking for somewhat specific kinds of stories, with somewhat specific kinds of information. So please don’t just scroll to the comments and pour out your heart. Please read this entire post before pouring out your heart. It’s not that long, I promise.

I’m writing a how-to guide about coming out atheist. I obviously want this guide to reflect a wide range of atheist experiences. So I’m gathering stories. And I’m looking for somewhat specific kinds of information. You don’t have to answer every one of these questions, btw — if you do, it’ll help, but partial answers will also be very useful.

So if you are openly atheist, please consider e-mailing Greta and telling her your story.

I’m back!

Ladies and gentlemen (and any other label you may prefer), I am home after a long trip that took me to Kamloops for Imagine No Religion 2, Toronto for work, and Montreal for vacation (and more work). I stupidly left my laptop in my apartment, so I have been unable to blog. This has been (by far) the longest I have been away from the site since I started it over 2 years ago, and I can’t imagine such an absence happening again.

Anyway, I’ve got lots to talk about: the conference, the protests in Montreal, the things I saw and did while on the road, and apparently there’s some talk about hooking up at conferences and flirting, so I might weigh in to that mess as well. I won’t be back to normal (and neither will the blog) until the weekend, so I hope you will bear with me as I try to get back into my groove.

Glad to be back!

A picture of me in Montreal

Here’s what’s happening now

A brief recap:

I was at Imagine No Religion 2 in Kalmoops, BC. I had a great time meeting a lot of fun new people, and enjoyed myself a great deal. I am currently on vacation until the 29th, when I will be flying back to Vancouver from a conference in Montreal.

However, like an idiot I left my laptop at home. As a result, I will not be blogging at all over the next week. My apologies to regular readers and to new ones, but while my phone can do many things, it is lousy as a device for writing. I will have very limited internet access in Montreal, even with my phone, so I will be almost completely off the grid for a while.

When I come back, I will be summarizing my experiences at INR2, posting pictures, and generally writing my ass off to get back up to speed. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter, or read the other fabulous authors here on FTB, many of whom were at INR2 as well. My repeated apologies for the extended downtime.

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So here’s what’s happening

Tomorrow afternoon I am going to be heading to Kamloops, BC for the Imagine No Religion 2 conference. I am looking forward to getting a chance to meet some of my fellow FTBorg, as well as soak in some godless goodness up in the mountains. This is pretty much the perfect time of year to go to Kamloops, because it will be sunny and pleasant.

On Sunday I am flying to Toronto for work, and will be shortly thereafter heading to Montreal. I’m there for another conference, and also because it’s Montreal and Montreal is amazing. I will be returning from my work/vacation on the 29th.

What this means for y’all is that I will be in vacation mode – fewer posts and shorter posts. Less activity on Twitter, and the comment moderation is going to be super-slow for those of you who are first-timers (or use a lot of links). I’d apologize, but I’m not sorry – between working full-time, blogging part-time, and trying to manage a rock band (on top of, y’know, having a social life), I feel like a couple of weeks of relative down time is not too much to ask.

It usually takes me a few days to bounce back following a trip like this, so expect normal functioning to resume starting at the beginning of June.

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Kiva project update: May 2012

I’ve been slacking again, but I took the opportunity today to update our Kiva project.

Mwanamisi is a married woman with 3 children, all of whom attend school. She owns a house that neither has electricity nor piped water. Her greatest monthly expenses are food and school fees. For the past five years, she has operated a weaving business. She uses coconut fronds to make roofing materials to sell from her home to her customers. She faces a major challenge of high transport expenses and seasonality. She dreams of starting a shop. With the Kshs. 40,000 she wants to purchase additional coconut fronds and increase her products. She decided to join Yehu to access loans to uplift her living standards.

Mohammad is 20 years old and lives in Gaza with his parents, who depend on him financially. He started work on his own farm recently; he raises and sells sheep and sheep products. His dream is to enlarge his business. He needs this youth loan to cover costs, so he asked Ryada for funds to build an additional enclosure for his sheep. He will be able to gain income and ensure economic stability for his family.

Grace is a 34-year-old married woman with three children living in Kagadi, Uganda. She operates a stationary business in Kagadi, which she has run for a period of five years. She got start-up capital from savings, as she first worked in a hotel as a waitress. Inadequate capital and price fluctuations are challenging factors affecting her business. She would like to educate her children and hire employees to help her expand her business. Grace wants a loan to buy books, pens, and reams of paper to sell.

This client, Masika, is the president of the loan association Espoir. A brave and tireless woman and an entrepreneur, she is 60 years old, divorced, and the mother of seven children. Among the births, there are twins. All of the children have their own homes already. Masika sells “mandale”, a local beverage. She started her business with her own funds from her husband before they divorced. Then she benefited from an initial loan as additional funding around 2008 from the microfinance institution Hekima. She says that this business has brought up her children, that is, the profits from her business went toward savings, food, and schooling costs. Masika makes her sales out of her home. However, she just obtained her 12th loan. This client decided to reduce the loan amount because a financial crisis is looming. This new loan must serve to supply her with the ingredients for making “mandale” drink (2 sacks of corn, sorghum, etc.) In addition, her ambition is to buy more plots of land for her children. This client thanks Hekima and her partners for their actions helping poor women with low incomes to become autonomous.

Sammy is a prospective student applying for a loan to start work on a Bachelor’s degree in Telecommunications at Strathmore University.

So there it is. I will try to remember to bug you to help me pick loans (as my usual thing is just to pick African women) when our money comes in at the beginning of June.

For the month of October, we made $46.38, and loaned $50.
For the month of November, we made $65.81, and loaned $50.
For the month of December, we made $44.76, and loaned $50.
For the month of January, we made $58.59.
For the month of February, we made $57.33 and loaned $125.

Total amount loaned so far: $275
Total loan funds repaid: $33.07
Fund balance: $23.47

Help a sistah out

Long-time Cromrade Autumn is proposing an interesting experiment:

I hear all the time from Christians that they feel discriminated against in day to day life. I find myself skeptical. I pretended to be Christian for years to avoid discrimination and harassment. This lead me to an idea. I’m uncertain about it so I thought I would put it up here, while I was thinking about it. I propose to dress in a manner that visually links me to a particular faith (and/or denomination) and record how I am being treated. At the end of the experiment, I will compare my notes to see if there was any difference, and if so, what- in the way I was treated.

This would mean dressing with a devotional scapular and a crucifix to be “Catholic” or underclothes to mimic the look of the undergarments and a CTR ring or jewelry when being “LDS,” etc. An atheist t-shirt would be my atheist “test” and no visible signs of any religion would be my control.

She is looking for some feedback on both the research question and the ethics of deception. Go read over her proposal and see what you think. Feel free to cross-post your comments here as well. My own thoughts below the fold:

[Read more…]

Learned helplessness

I got hit by a ‘double whammy’ this weekend. First, I watched The Trotsky on the plane to Kelowna (well, part of it – it’s a 30-minute flight). The premise of the movie seems a bit silly – a teenager who believes that he is the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky stages a coup in his high school in an attempt to organize the students into a union. It’s ostensibly a comedy, and is definitely a really funny film – the scenes where he woos a lawyer 10 years older than he are absolutely priceless. At the same time, the climactic scene (where the students charge up to the school with protest signs and righteous fury) fucks me every time I watch it, and my eyes start welling up like I’m a 6 year-old with a skinned knee.

Add to that a long conversation I had with Edwin Hodge about the heights of ridiculousness of post-modern thought (I more or less took Natalie Reed’s position – that post-modern thought can function alongside skepticism to help us critique the ways in which our own experiences and perspective affect truth claims), and whether or not political movements were undermined by the way in which postmodern perspectives can splinter populations that, from the outside, should share a single goal. The point I made to Edwin was that one doesn’t blame a CT scan for discovering problems we weren’t looking for. Postmodern ‘splintering’ is oftentimes simply the exposition of real divisions that exist, and provides a method by which groups who are not commonly represented in the majority group’s interests can keep their needs from being overlooked.

The problem of course is that the infighting that seems to happen – feminist atheists against anti-feminist; anti-racists against those who wish to ignore racism; trans skeptics against gender essentialists – all stem from a common route: the idea that the issues of the minority are not the real problem. Again, this is certainly an idea with easy appeal. After all, if we are a movement of atheists (for example), then our fight is with religion, not an esoteric crusade against systemic misogyny. The problem of course is that one cannot examine problems in isolation, and some issues cannot be extricated from larger, more diffuse problems. What ends up happening is that once the movement solves the “real” problem, the minority goes back to being ignored, having lost those who were allies of convenience. [Read more…]

Rapidly approaching adventures in meatspace

This is a reminder that I will be traveling to Kelowna, BC this weekend to participate in a vaccine education event hosting by CFI Okanagan:

The poster for the 'All About Vaccines' event

I’m looking forward to returning to my childhood stomping grounds and finally getting to meet some of the friendly skeptics out Kelownie way.

I’ll be back in the interior next month for the Imagine No Religion 2 conference. Also in attendance will be FTB’s own Maryam Namazie, PZ Myers, and Matt Dillahunty, as well as many other fine speakers. So for any of you in the BC interior who have an itching desire to meet me in person, you have two chances this spring. Hope to see some of you there!

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A quiet milestone

Today this blog celebrates its 2-year anniversary. While technically the “official” birthday for the Crommunist Manifesto was the 4th of February, I started regular posting in April, so that’s when I start counting. Given that most readers here started when I was brought into the FTB fold, I have decided to have the actual celebration in October. For me, though, it’s been a great 2 years.

When I first began the Manifesto, it was really just a place to organize some of my scattered thoughts on race, religion, and politics. Call it a sort of written talk therapy. I find that my own grasp of issues improves a great deal when I force myself to move them from the kind of diffuse, scattered form where they reside in my head into sensical, written English. While I wrote as though I had an audience, I never wrote for an audience. In those initial months, I was surprised and pleased to have anyone reading my writing – after all, who was I?

In my first year I gathered nearly 50,000 hits – a staggering amount for me, especially considering that I’d done little by way of promotion. Thanks to some well-placed links from friends and passers-by (and some shameless attempts at promotion via Pharyngula), I had built a small cadre of regular readers, some of whom were strangers to me outside the confines of the blog. I had achieved some small amount of recognition outside my own personal circle of friends, which was a really neat feeling (albeit intimidating at times).

When I talk to people who mention that they’d like to start their own blog, I tell them more about what I did then than what I do now. Having this platform (and being able to share it with more capable writers) gives me a lot more freedom to slack off, which you saw this past week. Back then, I had to scrabble and scrape for every post for fear of alienating readers who were expecting a new post every day. The writing didn’t come nearly as easily then as it does now, and I was writing posts 2 weeks in advance just to make sure that I didn’t get ‘caught’ without something to post the next day.

Managing this blog still comes with its challenges today, but little by little those challenges are being overwhelmed by the rewards. I’ll be going into this in some greater detail come October, but for now I just wanted to mark this little celebration myself and share it with you.

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