I’m still getting submissions, and I’m still getting asked how to make a submission. It’s easy! Write an essay of whatever length moves you on why you are an atheist, format it simply (just text is best, don’t get fancy on me so I have to fuss with it), and email it to [email protected], and I’ll toss it into my special WIAAA folder.
Then be patient.
The procedure I use is to open the folder, give it a flick with a mouse gesture to scroll to some place in the list, close my eyes, and click somewhere. Whatever I randomly select is what I post that day. You really are just seeing a random sample of the mailbag.
There are currently about 700 entries waiting in the queue, and more are trickling in every day. I post one a day, so that means that if you send me an entry, it might get posted tomorrow, or it might get posted two years from now. Please don’t write and ask me when your submission will be posted: I don’t know. You’re better off praying to the gods of chance.
I might not comment on every WIAAA posting, but I’ve read every one of them so far.
Oh, oh. PZ just endorsed prayer! (And multiple gods.)
Like a3kron, I read every one of these WIAAA posts. Thanks, PZ!
Aha! So you admit to letting the Goddess of Chance pick your atheists posts!
Having already had mine pulled out of your hat folder, I must conclude that the Goddess of Chance likes me. Damnit, I suppose this means I have to buy a fatted calf to slaughter in Her honor….
700! Two years! Here I’ll keep mine simple.
Hitchens, Dawkins, Myers, Harris, Dennett. The rest is just a gap filler. Enough said.
But that’s just me. Some of these have been awesome “why’s”.
Mine too. Raised Catholic, but accidentally developed a sense of ethics and fairness. Start with those and the math is trivial.
A couple of observations:
1 – it appears that the number of submissions received has been higher than 1 per day and PZ’s post is likely to spur a new batch. There will therefore be some submissions that will never be posted.
2 – ALL submissions posted so far have been well-written, well argued and compare favourably with the “best” of the “why I am a theist” submissions that PZ posted a while back.
I hope that the separation in quality continues indefinitely (or at least until my submission is posted, but that may never happen – see my first point)
Why I am an atheist:
I don’t really see that I have a choice.
Simple.
I’m an atheist because my beliefs are based on evidence. For instance, I don’t believe that I can cross the busy streets of my hometown and that cars will pass right through me.
The Goddess of Chance is Fortuna as everyone knows; it’s Englished as “Lady Luck.”
PZ, it’s wonderful that you have two years’ worth of “Why I am an Atheist” essays.
Unlike a simple queue, choosing randomly can produce starvation for unlucky submissions. I’m sure you can show a list of files ordered by date in Mac.
Would anyone possibly be interested in setting up a separate site dedicated to these submissions? We’d need a few hands to help out, but I’m sure it could be done fairly easily.
Of course, you could also sort them into oldest-first order and use the top one or two. Two a day spaced 12 hours apart would be fine with me.
I tried doing that on the Clipmarks site, but apparently Clipmarks is being shut down as no new clips have been able to be posted in the last few days and you can no longer respond to anything there. I really wanted an easy central location in which I could find them so that is very sad to me.
It seems such a shame that so many are being left for such a long time. 2 years or more seems like a long enough time that when some stuff is posted it will be out of date. I’ve personally found every single one of these “testimonials’ very informative and on the Clipmarks site where I was posting them it drove a few of the theists a little batty.
I’m going to shamelessly take the opportunity to plug my book here and let everyone know that Letters from an Atheist Nation: Godless Voices of America in 1903 is now available in paperback. Our stories haven’t changed much in 108 years. Also, if you’ve already read the Kindle version, please let me know what you think with a review. End of commercial. Thanks for reading.
Random = Fair
That’s cool.
Finally appropriate Ads “Remembering Christopher Hitchens”.
Maybe divide these entries into ‘seasons’ like they do with TV serials, and then give a few weeks of break between the old and the new season. This way people do not lose interest.
Example: Season 1 has ended. Season 2 will begin in mid January 2012. Please stay tuned.
jesec (#12):
The powers that be at FTB could set up a separate “Why I am an athiest” blog. It’s WordPress in the back end, so it can be set up so that registered users can make submissions, but entries are only published after an Editors’ approval.
The blog could be set up to publish submissions at a regular interval, maybe randomly taken from those that have been approved (to follow PZ’s current method).
Or, one could think of having a specific guest editor (FtB blogger?, others?) choose a selection to publish for a week.
Nah. It ain’t really random. It’s biased, actually. So it ain’t a fair chance. Here, just look at the method in use:
This list is most likely already sorted, though unknown by what criteria. If it’s reversed receive date, then the top ones are the latest and the bottom ones are the oldest. If it’s by date, then the entries move down as new ones are received. But it may also be sorted by name.
Since the list is 700 entries long already, then if the first thing PZ does is give a random flick of the mouse he has already scrolled the first listed entries out of view. It’ll also be unlikely he’ll mouse-flick far enough to reach the bottom of the list. So the random distribution doesn’t stretch to the top and tail of the list. If the list is sorted by name, then tough luck for Aaron and Zed. If the list is reverse sorted by date, tough luck for the early birds (the late birds will move down into the biased areas once new entries are received).
I’ll believe it is a random click if PZ accidentally starts a new message, deletes an item or closes his mail program. There is most likely bias in his wrist movements and mouse coordination, if only because he wants to stay within the boundaries of the list, but this – and other muscular or psychological constraints – may be causing him to cover a certain area of the screen more often with clicks than others.
Sigh. Why some people don’t simply use a proper PRNG with uniform distribution is beyond me.
In any case, since there are more entries received daily than there are removed from the list, it follows that the longer you are in the list, the more your chances of selection are decreased (after all, a one in 100 is a better chance than 1 in 700). For fairness sake, the selection method NEEDS a bias, a proper one, in particular, towards the age of an entry.
Or simply put them up in the order of receive date, of course…
Just what Brownian said at #6. Was told to “get some real sins” at age 6; figured it was all a fake & a moneymaker after that.
I think I know how he really does pick them but read carefully cause this is complicated: He writes most of them himself.
Why do you think hes too busy to see students some times during office hours? The dude is in there typing up testimonies. Most of them any how. But he has to use yours sometimes so you dont think hes doing it.
Dont tell me you aint seen some patterns. One goes like this: Kid is told theres a Santa, a easter bunny, and a god. When the kid is older dad tells the kid theres no Santa and no bunny but he dont change the god story any. The kid is confused. The confusion gets worse when the kid become a teenager because if hes a boy he learns that he likes boys and if hes a girl then she starts liking girls. But cause mom, dad, and church says that god dont like gay kids the boy (or girl) keeps it to its self. But its not always boy on boy or girl on girl sometimes its both or it can even be animals or trees. The kid stays bottled up and pops when he grows up. He might confront his parents or he might not but he will definitely confront god and all the other gods too.
Dont you all tell me you aint seen this. Its like a factory template.
I admit I cant prove this. Its just my theory. But it definitely aint no worst than Darwins.
Toot! Toot!
rtootie, the Force (of stupidity) is strong in you.
Well, not that it really matters for me. My entry wasn’t really good. It was too short.
Sean Boyd, the power (of the piper) is strong in you.
You can tell the flock whats in the kool-aid but they are still gonna drink it! Get on little lemming. Do what lemmings do.
Toot! Toot!
Rather clumsy lie there.
There have been 30 or more of these stories. They are signed. Usually the author shows up and comments on them or explains further.
Not one single person has ever said PZ edited or changed a single word.
Typical creationist. Since creationism is a lie, all creationists lie a lot.
BTW, there are 67 million No Religions. Almost as much as the fundie death cultists. They are increasing rapidly as people leave the US xian religions.
They leave US xianity in order of best and brightest. Leaving the dumb and ignorant behind. You will be Left Behind and not in the way the Rapture Monkeys mean it.
You wouldn’t know. You are about 11 years old and being homeschooled by illiterate morons who are afraid you might end up knowing more than them.
A baseless fear, won’t happen. But it’s OK. We always need people to mow our lawns and do the laundry.
At least you got one thing right.
I don’t really know why I am an atheist. I thought about writing one of these “Why I Am An Atheist” things. However, when I examined the issues that I wanted to bring up, I realized that I would be writing “How I Became An Atheist”, a story of my personal journey. The “whys” would not be addressed. I credit my father. My father was an Art Bell devotee, a Sai Baba acolyte, and an Erich von Däniken true believer. At my father’s knee, I read the books of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa and any number of other woo tomes. I never rejected, or rebelled against my father’s beliefs. I simply acquired a taste for imaginative literature. That led me to Science Fiction Literature. At the age of 14, I had the most influential epiphany of my life: I am a science fiction fan. I am now 52 years old, and I am a science fiction fan. And from science fiction I moved to science… but that’s not true. My father loves science, too. I learned to love science at my father’s knee: all his woo was pseudoscience based. My love of science fiction taught me that there is real science and fake science. Both can be fun, but for different reasons. My father has a genuine joy in learning new stuff. I have that too… but I don’t like being fooled. I never did, not even as a kid. As a kid, I despised professional magicians. Their job was to fool me… screw that noise. As an adult, I forgive the professional magician. As an adult, I do not forgive religion. That attempt to fool me is too dangerous, too potentially harmful. And the bottom line is, when it comes to religion, I have no need for that hypothesis.
No, there isn’t going to be a separate site for them — that would be silly. One of the advantages of putting them here is that they tap into the traffic on Pharyngula. Put ’em elsewhere, they’ll languish.
There are other things I do to randomize: I’ve got six different criteria to sort by, and I can sort ascending or descending. I do a different sort every day. One flick doesn’t scroll the list by the full length, so I also vary by scrolling down not at all, by 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 the length of the list, then scrolling randomly. I can’t say there are no biases in the method, but it’s not as simple as that older entries are more likely to get buried.
My main concern is to avoid selecting by content — I want to get a variety of essays.
rtootie: you’re a moron.
Raven: there have been 69 of these stories so far. Every one of them gets moved into a separate folder once posted, so I don’t have to worry about selecting them a second time.
[silly]
PZ, only six criteria? ;)
Wait, these are oral histories?
Binary oral history.
This is why I love this place.
Oh, PZ? Thank you for writing my “Why I Am An Atheist” essay. You got me spot on. How do you do that?
Yes, indeed, this has a great deal of explanatory power. Are you an idiot?
PZ, here’s a new pattern, since “you” are so bereft of new ideas. I’m an atheist because that was all part of the gods’ plans. I’m not a god, so there was no way for me to stop them from tricking me. If there are other atheists, it seems likely the gods were part of a vast conspiracy to deceive us into believing we would need evidence of their existence. Since it’s obvious that religious goons don’t need evidence to believe their nonsense, neither do we.
Thus, the gods exist. But not Yawheh/Allah. Because he’s an asshole.
@ piplagenta, #29…
I hear you Pip,… your story sounds similar to mine in a number of ways. I can relate.
Being aware of all internet memes, here’s the appropriate one.
Raven,
You dont think highly of folks who mow lawns and do laundry for a living do you?
PZ Myers,
I saw you in “Expelled”! I loved that movie. You provided an awesome cameo, by the way!
Sean Boyd,
Thanks for giving me some credit. At least theres one person around here who is fair and balanced.
consciousness razor,
Huh?
[OT]
Himself, not an internet meme, but I prefer this one: The Most Idiotic of Idiots!
I’m always fascinated how hypocritical idjits like rtootie describe how they think we do things, when they they are the ones doing it, not us. Think of how many godbotters delete each and every critical post of their presuppositional and delusional fuckwittery that their imaginary deity exists. They create sockpuppets and welcome sycophants because they must have a cheering section. Yet, here at Pharyngula, it is difficult to be banned, and unless one is a real bigot, the posts remain. Funny how they must be the ones who get constant validation, but they accuse us of that. As PZ says, real morons.
What is a sycophant? I see this word alot here.
rtootie:
Really?
I have two kids. Both are now adults and in college. I was very happy when they got past this stage. When they were about, oh, nine years old. As the artist formerly and currently known as Prince once sang, “Act your age, not your shoe size.”
And, with that incredibly depressing comment (not sure if rtootie or the fact that I remembered a line from a Prince song depresses me more).
[walks upstairs mumbling]damn tolls aren’t even original anymore the damn things sound like eight or nine year old brats mumble mumble damn trolls mumble mumble . . . .
Too much cheap whiskey in the last couple of days or maybe not enough. I don’t know. To Poe or not to Poe?
Try Google like any adult would. Sycophant.
If you are a Poe, not funny.
I’m an atheist because I can see no way to believe that God is anything other than a projection of our mind created in the ignorance of our species. There doesn’t seem anything more to it.
Don’t really want to put that into a queue of 700, there’s probably a whole lot of those comments that have said that already in a much more eloquent way.
Stevie Wonder can see what you did there.
I figured my story is too dull to add in.
WIAAA comes down to: Chapter 1 of The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. I’d NEVER believed, it’s true. My parents were lapsed Anglicans (and considering how laissez-faire Anglicanism is, lapsing is SERIOUSLY lapsing) and I only went to Sunday School because that’s where the neighbourhood kids went on Sunday. I was always in trouble there for asking unanswerable questions. So I drifted along for a number of years as an agnostic of few questions. Then I picked up The Blind Watchmaker and read chapter one and that was that: immediate atheist. PZ just makes it fun to watch and play :).
I figure “I got Dawkinsed” is not that different to so many others here.
It does show the importance of good communication, though. I never believed, always questioned, never got good answers and was addicted to science. I have always, really, been an atheist. But reading Chapter 1 of TBW, where Dawkins puts all of the pieces together and explains how science shows gods are unnecessary, was what I needed to actually understand what I was.
[meta]
AmandaS, I figure you’ve figured wrong.
(I encourage you to email that to [email protected])
Why not also ask people to send their submissions to “We are Atheism”?
I think that is a site that ought to get a little more exposure.
– Radi
radi, you just did! :)
Oh great Norebo, please allow the great cursor of PZ to rest on the entry which bears my name…
Oh wait, I haven’t sent him one.
As far as I can tell my 16 yo son has never believed in God. I always went out of my way to point out that no one has put forward the tiniest thread of evidence for such a thing. (We still talk about it though because one does have to walk among the faithful…) However, he believed in Santa Claus for years longer than his contemporaries. After all, if you ask the same question about Santa Claus and God to a child, it isn’t hard for them to come up with tangible evidence that there is a Santa Claus. You go to sleep and some presents appear marked “From Santa.” The evidence becomes even stronger if they make a “Santa List” and one or more of the items on their list appears! Young children lack the tools to analyze the phenomenon of the appearance of gifts in a way that allows them to see that it really isn’t good evidence after all…
Isn’t it a wrong question to ask? Shouldn’t the correct question be: why are you a materialist? That’s how people here interpret it, anyway. I haven’t seen buddhists here yet, explaining why they are atheists.
johnjohn, why materialist over a nondescript naturalist? Can’t non-reductive physicalists be atheists too?
“You’re better off praying to the gods of chance.”
…. or increasing our odds by spamming your mailbox so when you do that little magic-scroll thingie, we’ll have a better chance at being selected. Then again, I assume gmail will just put it into one folder. Damn.
Sunday Afternoon wrote:
Probably, just cause the blog won’t last forever. However, even if he received 10 essays per day, and posted one randomly chosen essay every day, if the blog goes on long enough, every essay will eventually get posted (almost surely).
Kel, non-reductive physicalists can be atheists too, but so can be people who believe in Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy or libertarianism. Just not believing in monotheistic god is not the point, don’t you think?
PS. I’m johnjohn, it just was a wrong nick.
that’s–really stupid. Remarkably stupid. (hence my remark)
I submitted my essay only to be accused by Dr. Myers in e-mail of “mocking the entire enterprise”.
moi?
rtootie, have you ever seen a university professor? Or a highschool teacher for that matter? Teaching is incredibly time-consuming, because every lesson needs to be prepared, and then there’s grading the exams of up to several hundred students at once…
It doesn’t happen often that people manage to make themselves so ridiculous in just one comment. My respect! Quite a performance. *sound of one hand clapping*
That sounds interesting. Could you send it to me by e-mail? :-)
No need.
Let’s just say it was modeled very closely on this.
chigau (違う) says:
Best explanation so far. Not that most of the WIAAA stories have not been interesting and compelling. But it all boils down to this.
In a sense, yes. Naturalism is vastly different to Raëlism, yet we’ll both gladly say “God is a myth”. Just trying to highlight that perhaps materialism is too narrow a subset of naturalism to have it as the marker for rational atheism.
Buddhists aren’t necessarily atheists, not even in the dictionary athiest sense.
And if you allow for a wider (and IMO more sensible) definition of atheism, buddhism is full of wooish ideas like karma and reincarnation, with no evidence whatsoever for those.
I don’t get those who try to distinguish atheism from any extraordinary claim. If it was shown that ghosts or psychic powers exist, those wouldn’t constitute a reasonable case for theism.
Why am I an atheist?
Short but sweet: Because no religion I’ve ever heard of makes one slightest bit of sense.
Several people here have said that they read every posting of Why I Am an Atheist. I read the first few and got bored. Now I skip over them.
I suppose if one has had to go through a long and difficult process of self-deprogramming in order to shed the intellectual and emotional shackles of religion, the experiences of others who have also had to do so might be personally significant.
I’m an atheist simply because I was never coerced to be anything else.