My path to disbelief began Wednesday, June 27, 1979.
I know the exact date, because I wrote it in the copy of Woody Allen’s “Without Feathers” my grandfather purchased for me on a road-trip we took together. The irony is that his faith was strong, and he never would have purchased that book for me if he’d known it would lead to the unravelling of any belief I had in his religion.
Throughout my childhood, I remember having many issues with the concept of belief in the supernatural. I was fascinated by it, as are most children with a good imagination, but I could never quite bring myself to actually believe any of it at face value.
Because I’m a nosy bastard, that’s why. I can’t leave anything alone. As soon as I spot a loose end I’m picking at that thing to see what unravels, and there are a lot of loose ends in theism.
I must have been about five when my brother and I built what we thought would serve as a handy container for Santa’s collection of assorted vintage beers. Apparently we got it into our heads that he was an avid drinker. It was a cardboard box with a cut-out reindeer head taped to the side, a feat of what seemed at the time an achievement of artisan carpentry that could have provoked Jesus to throw his messiah badge away in lugubrious defeat. In retrospect it was probably a bit naff. Our parents were now faced with the question of what to do with it on Christmas Eve. In the end they settled on the plan to forge a note from Santa claiming that he thought is was so good, he didn’t want to separate us from it, and so had it magically duplicated, and kept one of the duplicates for himself.
Because all of that time-wasting god-bothering is a load of old bollocks.
Julian
Yesterday my father died.
It was a cruel way to die: a stage 4 glioblastoma tumor was pressing on the speech centre of his brain and robbed him of his speech for most of the past year. For a university professor who communicated science passionately this was adding insult to injury. But he generally faced his illness and advancing death with a calmness and acceptance that most would expect from those that know they will be heading off to a better afterlife. And yet he was an atheist from beginning to end.
They’re doing it again: Ten Bruggencate and Hovind are selling content from atheist interviews, cutting out the parts where they agree to not use it for profit.
The only appropriate response at this point, I think, is to recognize them as frauds and liars, and never participate in anything with them. They call you? Hang up. They stick a microphone in your face at an event? Turn your back on them. Reject them wholesale, and treat them as the dishonest parasites they are.
I grew up in a small village in the country, and so I had the great fortune of being a kid surrounded by nature. I used to play outside everyday and catch frogs and insects – and soon I was completely fascinated by the animals and the plants that lived around me. I took interest in them aided by the lot of books my parents provided me with, and by watching all the documentaries by David Attenborough that aired on the Italian TV (my parents recorded them, so I was never deprived).
So as a child, I knew all about freshwater animals and could identify almost every bird I saw, and though now I’ve forgotten most of those notions – since I later took the Humanities path instead of a scientific one – I guess my self-taught natural history background has played a big part in my actual worldview. The concept of evolution is something I’ve been familiar with since I can remember, I never had trouble accepting it because it made perfectly sense to me, and the evidence for that was just outside the door.
I come from a Colombian Catholic middle class family. I was enrolled in a Franciscan school for girls when I was 4. All the women in my family had attended, were attending or would attend Colegio Alvernia. It was a family tradition.
At school, we weren’t allowed to go to mass until we were 7– the age of reason. In the meantime, they would teach us about the Bible and Saint Francis of Assisi’s life. I didn’t like the holy book very much because God asked people to sacrifice animals and children. The tales of the Bible were worse than the stories from Der Struwwelpeter that my parents used to read to me to dissuade me from being bad. However, St. Francis was cool and his awesomeness made up for all the crap in the Bible. He treated animals with respect and kindness and had super powers that I wanted— like talking to wolves and having birds do stuff for him.
Hey, I’m leaving Germany. I spent my morning and early afternoon hanging out with lovely smart people, as I’ve been doing all week — Taslima Nasreen, Michael Nugent, Rebecca Watson, Leo Igwe, and all the good attendees who’d come out to Köln for the AAI meeting. Then I spent the rest of the afternoon riding trains to get to the Düsseldorf airport (let me just say that civilized countries have rail networks painlessly linking their cities. Hint, hint, America). And now I’m waiting for my evening flight to Reflavik.
Now about the meeting…
It was a fine weekend, but there were a few awkwardnesses. There was no wireless at the venue (I was told it was broken and couldn’t be fixed in time), and access at the hotel was very flaky. You may have noticed that there was little new material here this weekend— and I also wasn’t able to live-blog or tweet what was going on. I just kind of relaxed and let the meeting flow over me, which was fine for me, but unfortunate that modern conferences use twitter to allow fast real-time reporting from an event, which helps build interest.
Another small problem: some of the talks were in German (I don’t object–it’s Germany!), but the language of the talks wasn’t clearly labeled. That meant that all the barbarous mono-lingual people fled the room at any hint the next speaker was native German. I think most of us experienced at least once the uncomfortable situation of finding ourselves in the auditorium with an enthusiastic speaker lecturing away in what was pure gobbledygook to ourselves — I imagine this is how a biologist would feel if he stumbled into a physics lecture– and trust me, no one would want to experience that twice.
It meant I missed what looked like very good talks, from their titles. It wouldn’t take much to fix it — I did attend one lecture by Prof. Bergmeier, in German, and he provided a handout with a rough translation of his text, organized by his slides. That’s all it took to make his talk comprehensible to us benighted foreigners. (He talked about how the medieval church was a huge drain on the resources of Europe, very interesting stuff. Note to meeting organizers: historians have a lot to contribute to atheist meetings. Invite more!)
The venue was just about perfect. It was held in a nice European theater: the big auditorium, with good acoustics, was upstairs, and the ground floor was a restaurant/bar. You could start drinking beer at 9am (I didn’t) and you could get drinks any time. It was a lovely environment for schmoozing.
Stars of the show were: Taslima, who quietly described the indignities and difficulties she fought her way out of as a Bengali woman; Leo Igwe, who so passionately talked about African injustice (about the Catholic church, he shouted, “ANY SUPERNATURALLY-INFORMED ORGANIZATION IS PART OF THE PROBLEM!” Yes!); and Rebecca Watson, who really let her anger out at the assholes who make excuses for the abuse of women.
It’s been a great weekend. You shoulda been there. Or even any more local Freethought event. If you haven’t gone to one, know this: to be among a group of happy enthusiastic rational people who reject supernatural events is a wonderfully invigorating experience. It is so weird to be sitting here now, feeling exhausted and jet-lagged, yet also feeling totally buzzed on a community-driven intellectual high. You have to try it — it’s like the best drug ever.
