Why I am an atheist – JB

I’m an anti-theist.  I used to be an atheist but I realized that it did not describe my true feelings.  And let’s face it somewhere between theist, atheist, and anti-theist it’s all about your belief system.  I grew up Mormon in the deep south.  My family are multi-generational Mormons active in both their faith and church leadership.  I left my religion at the age of 18 as I watched friends of mine coming back off their missions.  Young men and women who had been brainwashed and inculcated into the hyperbolic microcosm that is the mormon religion.

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Speak louder, Catherine Deveny!

That Deveny…she’s always causing trouble. And good for her.

She recently appeared on a panel debate show on Australian TV, Q&A, with Peter Jensen, an Anglican bishop. Jensen is smug, smarmy ass: when he wasn’t whining that we need a respectful discussion about the issues, he was announcing that women should submit to men in marriage, that same-sex marriage is unbiblical, that homosexuality is a disease, and no, the homophobia of the church can’t possibly contribute to gay teen suicide rates. He’s one of those guys who puts on his politeness with his clerical collar, and thinks both make him absolutely right, and able to say the most vile lies with smooth confidence.

Catherine Deveny was brash, smart, and assertive, and openly atheist. She is also a woman. She spoke the truth — that the church is a medieval institution promoting homophobia and misogyny, and that the facts and an unbiased morality of equality do not support Jensen’s claims.

Guess which one got all the negative press?

…I should not have been surprised at the fall-out from Catherine Deveny’s appearance on ABC’s Q&A this week. Deveny’s opposition to Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, resulted in an onslaught of vitriolic criticism and abuse – even from those who claim to support her positions on asylum seekers, same-sex marriage and women’s equality.

Even the Australian weighed in with an editorial reprimanding Deveny and the ABC for failing to show the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney ‘proper regard’ and ‘respect’.

While the Australian characterises (or more accurately, caricatures) Deveny as mocking, crude, crass and intolerant, Jensen is ‘frank, concerned and conciliatory on homosexual health issues’. Deveny, we are told, was guilty of ‘shouting down’ the Archbishop.

Don’t they realize that the proper regard and respect to show a leader of institutionalized dogma is to turn him away at the door, and to spit in his eye every time he demands a respect to his position that he won’t show to women, gays, the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised? Catherine Deveny, rather than being excesively rude, showed remarkable restraint at having to sit next to the poisonous old fraud.

But no, Chrys Stevenson documents the insults flung at Deveny — she was a crazy bitch who should shut up and brought down the whole tone of the event by dominating the conversation. What about that?

Curiously, as this was one of the rare Q&A’s where the women (Catherine Deveny, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Anna Krien) outnumbered the men, the male guests (Peter Jensen and Chris Evans) still managed to dominate the conversation 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

To the contrary of her critics, I think the other panelists were all dreary bores who said a range of things (some sensible, some odious) and Deveny was the only person who made the event interesting. But this attention that the public pays to mouthy women (even when she clearly gave everyone else a chance to speak their piece) ought to be recognized for what it is: being nice is a tool of the status quo; complaining about tone is an attempt to silence the passion and outrage of the oppressed; privilege perpetuates itself by labeling difference as deviancy.

Keep on speaking up, Catherine Deveny!

Why I am an atheist – James Yakura

Because of Santa Claus.

Yes, this is going to take a bit of explaining. I was raised by parents who encouraged creativity and curiosity, who had shelves upon shelves of books on all walls of the house. And I had access to books as well: science fiction, fantasy, nonfiction. I remember quite clearly reading and rereading a science encyclopedia aimed at young children. I remember regular trips to the museum in Denver. I remember learning about how science worked by observing the world, and rejecting a belief if what was observed did not match the belief.

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Why I am an atheist – Ruthy McCoy

I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist during my childhood, but I certainly was un-churched and if someone had asked me about my opinion of god I would have shrugged my shoulders and said “I don’t know.  Maybe”.  But my friends believed in him and he seemed important to them, so I decided to test his existence by asking for him to show me a tornado because I had always wanted to see one.  I mean, he was supposedly all powerful and such, so that shouldn’t be such a difficult task, right?  I lived in Colorado where tornados were fairly common and I found that even under what should have been easy circumstances to produce a tornado (inclement weather), god could not do it when I asked.  I mean, god, god, you couldn’t even give me a god damn tornado when it was like all windy and lightning-ing and thundering everywhere?  Pathetic.  And so I decided there was probably nothing out there.

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Repudiation

Dear Ron Lindsay:

I have to take exception to one small part of your recent post.

Greta Christina and PZ Myers have recently suggested that is it not necessarily a bad thing to be divisive. True, it is not necessarily a bad thing. It depends on what one is separating oneself from.

In her blog post, Greta Christina responded to the charge that the Atheism Plus initiative is divisive by claiming that the secular community is divided already. As evidence for this claim, she offered several deplorable incidents and actions, principally involving hate-filled threats and comments to women, many of which would be familiar to anyone active in the movement. She then asked rhetorically why such vile conduct has not been called “divisive.”

But if hate-filled comments and threats to women have not been expressly called divisive, it’s because such conduct does not threaten to divide the movement. It has already been repudiated, both implicitly and explicitly, by many, if not most, of the organizations in the movement.

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Why I am an atheist – Helen Nicholls

As a young child I used to wonder why I existed at all. The thought made me dizzy. I considered the only answer I knew, that God had created it but it was not satisfactory. I also thought about death. I remember the moment I realised that one day I would die and that when that happened my consciousness would ceased and I simply would not be. The thought overwhelmed me and made me feel sick. I clutched at the easy answer; that I would go to Heaven. In order to believe that I had to believe in God as well and so I did. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It is only with hindsight that I realise that it was the fear of death that made me push away all my doubts.

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Why I am an atheist – Inflection

When I was very young, my Dad combed my hair.  I don’t know why; perhaps I was hilariously bad at it.  But it meant that we had a few minutes one-on-one in the morning before he went to work and I went to daycare or the like.  We would talk about whatever was on our minds.  It was on one of these morning that we broached the subject of first cause, or, as a young child would put it, where everything comes from.  He explained about the Big Bang and the Primordial Point.  I don’t remember the words, but the image in my mind is vivid.

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