Anti-creationism legislation—imagine that!

I’ve got to pay attention to the good news more often. My in-box is full of comments about anti-evolution, creationist legislation, but I missed this one: Louisiana SB70 is an anti-creationist bill that “Repeals the Louisiana Science Education Act.” Zack Kopplin has a website combating creationism that focuses on the rational Louisianians and what they’re doing to bring reason to the state.

I’ll call your attention to one notable fact: they’ve got 75 Nobel laureate scientists to endorse this law. If you know a science laureate who hasn’t signed the petition — I noticed a few names missing myself — you might mention it to them.

Why I am an atheist – Phil Hoenig

This essay was originally going to be just the one sentence: “I am an atheist because I am educated.” It’s laconic and full of all sorts of wonderful implications: theists are ignorant, the truth is that there are no gods, if only people could be shown that truth they would all realise it and the abuses of religion would disappear forever. There’s probably a touch of smugness in there too.

As well as being an atheist, I’m a huge procrastinator and between thinking up that as an answer and actually submitting it, I thought about this further and realised that there’s far more to it than the fact that I have been lucky enough to receive an education. To see why education was not a sufficient requirement for atheism I had to look no further than my own family.

I was raised as a Catholic. The church had its clutches on me until seven (although luckily only in a metaphorical sense) and for many years afterwards. Although some members of the extended family back in the old country didn’t appear particularly church-going, I had always assumed that the family had been Catholic for generations, for all I knew going back for two thousand years. It was only a few years ago, decades after the pantomime when I first explicitly told my parents I was an atheist – “I’m not a Catholic.”, “Yes you are.”, “No, I’m not.”, “Yes you are. That’s what it says on your birth certificate.”, “My birth certificate also says I’m not even a foot tall and only weigh a few pounds. I’ve grown up since then.” – they reconciled themselves to my lack of faith and the whole matter was regarded as academic, I had a chat with my grandmother and found out that it’s really only my mother who is religious and the reason why she was such a devoted Catholic daughter to not particularly religious parents.

My mother was an intelligent girl. Even if her parents weren’t religious themselves, they recognised that she had a lot of potential and wanted the best education they could get for her. Unfortunately the best education available was at the local Catholic school. From what I gather the stereotypes of Catholic schools of the era held true there; the teachers were all nuns in habits with a deep devotion to the teachings of Rome, a strong ruler in their hand and a knowledge of how to use it to instill the fear of God into their pupils. What would otherwise have been the best education my mother could have had at the time was poisoned by these black-clad sadistic authoritarians and to this day her mind remains stunted by it.

Compared to the educational opportunities I had as a boy in the seventies in eighties, the opportunities my mother had as a girl in the fifties and sixties would have been limited. The pursuit of maths and science would not have been encouraged anywhere near as much for her as it was for me. Nevertheless, I can’t help but feel a huge sense of sadness at the potential wasted when an intelligent woman tells me with all sincerity that praying to Saint Anthony will help me find lost objects, and an even larger sense of rage when she tells me that she believes in a literal eternity of hellfire, and that fear of such makes it very hard if not impossible for her to question what she was taught as a young girl.

Why am I an atheist? The reason why I believe there are no gods – at least the proximate cause – does have to do with the fact that I did receive an education. Without it I wouldn’t have all the little jigsaw pieces I’ve used to make my model of the world, and it’s this model that’s given me an abiding love of the scientific process. It is most emphatically not a religion. It recognises the fact that its description of the universe is sometimes inaccurate or just plain wrong and endeavours to incrementally correct it. It acknowledges that the human brain likes to make patterns even when patterns aren’t really there and tries to circumvent this tendency when it can. It does not say that the Universe is thus because I or a voice inside my head say so and nay-saying will bring forth retribution, but because I did these experiments and made these observations and that you can do them yourself to verify it or come up with your own experiments and observations if you think they’ll do a better job explaining it. It’s because of this that I accept what science says as a fairly good approximation of what the Universe really is like. Despite the charlatans or the misinformed, science has not found any evidence for the existence of gods and until it does I am not going to believe that there are any.

The reason why I find the above reasoning valid – the ultimate cause of my atheism – is harder to pin down. Could I just have easily followed the same path as my mother? Creating a model of the world where Catholicism – or any other theistic religion – had the answer to everything and any inconsistencies could be explained away by evil forces or just ignored for fear of divine punishment? I’d like to think that it’s because I am more independently minded than her, but is that a fair assessment? Maybe it’s because my education had more science lessons and fewer cruel nuns.

The seeds of cognitive dissonance would have been planted when I was about ten or so, before I had any issues with authoritarianism. Religious teaching was no more complicated then “Jesus died for your sins, God loves you, but you need to follow his rules.” Science was a lot of cool facts but little explanation about how we knew these facts. I wanted to know how, if there were these monkeys that slowly turned into men, where did Adam and Eve come into the story. I did not get a satisfying answer. I did not abandon Catholicism then and there – like many I could make an accommodation between religion and science – but it was the first time I could not blindly follow religious and scientific teachings simultaneously and have to choose one over the other.

I was a fan of Jesus, but found his weekly fan club meetings were boring and pointless. Science I mostly got from books telling me – mirabile dictu – that there were beautiful spiral galaxies out there, and planets with spots on them bigger than the entire Earth or that had rings! There’s stuff that blows up if you get it wet, and a gas that will poison you with one breath, but if you mix the two together you get salt! The stuff in my pencil was made of the same stuff as a diamond, just arranged in a different way! We used to be little monkeys before we changed into people! Me and my dog had the same great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather! One hundred million years ago there were these big lizards walking, swimming and flying around the place!

When I look deeply into the question, perhaps the real reason I am an atheist is because to a ten – or almost forty, for that matter – year-old boy, dinosaurs are cool. Perhaps it’s not too late to tell my mother that.

Phil Hoenig
Australia

A poll on AA’s new billboards

The world is changing. For one thing, American Atheists are doing a better and better job of making billboards — less cluttered, cleaner, with a simpler message appropriate to a billboard, yet still wonderfully provocative (This is also, by the way, a great example of how pointed internal criticism can lead to improvements). These are also good examples of targeting the message, to the Jewish and Islamic communities.

Another way the world is changing is that more and more people are pointing these silly online polls out to me, and they’re already skewed in a favorable direction by the time I arrive. Really, it’s weird: 5 years ago, we’d find some mainstream poll and it would initially be insanely anti-atheist, and nowadays they’re usually more closely split. Like this one:

Do you think these billboards are appropriate?

Yes. American Atheists have every right to express their views and do outreach. 55%

No. It’s unnecessary provocation to put the billboards up in religious communities. 43%
Not sure. 2%

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make it more insanely biased in favor of the reasonable answer, of course.

Sikivu causes discomfort…

…with her criticism of this last weekend’s CFI conference.

Good.

What I’d like to see at some future conference (planners, take notice) is that at least one of the days is turned over to people of color issues — and I mean completely turned over. The white organizers just leave a big hole in their schedule, contact people like Sikivu Hutchinson and Anthony Pinn, and let them organize, arrange, choose speakers and format, and bring in the evening’s entertainment, using the organizations resources. Instead of the mostly white organization inviting a black speaker or two, hand the reins over to some black organizers and let them build what they want to hear and what we all should hear.

Or if some organization is feeling really brave, turn over the whole conference to this topic. We talk the talk all the time, but real progress will be made when atheists sit down and listen. American Atheists, CFI, American Humanists, any of the big atheist organizations: will you make that commitment?

I think the way to appreciate and recognize our black and brown intellectual leaders is to have them lead.

Why I am an atheist – Clare

I was brought up in a Church of England family. No, that doesn’t quite do it justice. I was swathed in the church, surrounded by dyed in the wool Anglicans, from the moment I was born. I went to a service at least once a week, every week (even when on holiday). On top of that, I went to sunday school, church youth group and pot luck suppers. I have sung in plays, musicals, carol concerts and outdoor events. I’ve even appeared on Songs of Praise!

It was against this backdrop that I slowly began to perceive other possibilities.

I don’t think I’d ever truly believed. I wanted to believe. I even had, what felt at the time, spiritual experiences. But I think I knew even then that these were nothing more than sensory manipulation – beautiful music, twinkling candles, incense, harmonious voices and shared emotional experiences.

I was educated at a grammar school and was introduced to mind openers such as world history, physics, chemistry and critical thinking. In my late teens, I subscribed to New Scientist and developed an interest in physics. Later, I read A Brief History of Time and, although I struggled with the maths (I’m more of a humanities person), the concept of deep time and the vastness of space fascinated me.

Around this time, I began to see the injustices in the world outside the church yard wall. My social and political awareness was developing at a time of Band Aid, Nelson Mandela, Apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, AIDS and a growing awareness of LGBT issues. I also began to perceive discrimination against my own gender whilst listening to the debates over the ordination of women priests.

In my early twenties, I started to pick up bits and pieces about evolution. Having only a rudimentary grasp of biology, I again looked to popular science books and eventually discovered Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale.

These different threads were weaving a pattern in which there was less and less room for a god.

I stopped going to church with my family when I was 18 but it was perhaps another decade or so before I would call myself an atheist. In the intervening years, I read about different religions, humanism, secularism, rationalism, scepticism and feminism. I am “out” to my friends and some work colleagues but not to my parents, although I’m sure they suspect. The reasons, as always with such situations, are complicated.

At present my reaction to religion is similar to that of ex-smokers towards cigarettes. They can be far more vehemently opposed to smoking than a non-smoker would ever be. In the same way, I have a visceral reaction to religions and religious behaviour, especially when I get a knee jerk response from that inner child who grew up in a church.

I am now trying to remove those angry knots and burrs from my tapestry so that it only reflects the beauty and wonder of my one precious lifetime on our amazing planet.

Clare
United Kingdom

Why I am an atheist – A Texan

I am an atheist because the God I loved and served faithfully just got too damn small. Too formulaic. Too predictable.

I was born again in high school and was a committed believer all the way through high school and college. I loved Jesus and was sure God was the answer to everything. I believed in grace and mercy and love. My God was huge. And perfect. And more loving, compassionate and mysteriously wonderful than anything I could describe.

Then I went into full time ministry. I could tell so many stories now about the corporate waste, the hypocritical leadership, the stupid acronyms and formulas that were used to shrink God down to a sellable product. My God shrank right before my eyes. It took disillusionment with ministry to make me stop and rethink my beliefs. The nagging feeling that there was something tremendously wrong with evangelical christianity that I had successfully repressed for years became too strong. The mental gymnastics I had been performing to explain away God’s sexism, anger, vengefulness and petty demands became too much for me. For the very first time, I looked at my beliefs from a skeptical viewpoint.

I wanted my God to withstand the test. I held on to bits and pieces of my faith for awhile. But, intellectual integrity demanded that I accept what is true over what I wanted to be true. I no longer believe in any of it. And, to my surprise, as my God got tiny and unbelievable and I was forced out of my insular world, an indescribably huge and beautiful world opened up around me. The truth has set me free.

A Texan
United States

The name “Kent Hovind” is like a demonic conjuration

There’s an odd phenomenon that crops up now and then. Every once in a while, an old thread is revived and the discussion gets lively again…and often it’s because yet another deluded fanatical creationist has been searching the web using the magic phrase “Kent Hovind” and found my site. And then they’re all offended because I point out that Hovind is a deeply ignorant fraud and tax cheat who was sentenced to 10 years in prison (currently serving his time in Florence, Colorado; expected release in 2015).

By the way, you should listen to his phone calls from jail. Criminal mastermind, he is not.

Anyway, it’s happened again. Some creationist dufus has hurled himself into a three-year old thread. So what I’m going to do is close that thread, and send the conversation here, where everyone can join in and have fun.

Why I am an atheist – E. Knight

I am an Atheist because I was raised without religion and figured out pretty quick that it was silly all on my own. My parents are both Atheists, but when I was young, they certainly didn’t try and convert me to their beliefs. I believed in God as a child, in a private personal way in that I believed that I had come from “Heaven” and that I had slid down an invisible slide into my mummy’s belly. I discarded God before I even discarded Santa and with much the same calm sense of understanding, like an imaginary friend I had outgrown. My parents were always open to questions and my Father in particular was my favourite bouncing board for all the questions I had about religions, he answered my questions as clearly and accurately he could; needless to say none of it ever made any sense to me. I am 19 and I still have fascinating conversations with my Father, I have questions, he gives me the best answers he can, if I don’t know and he doesn’t know, and it wasn’t a half rhetorical philosophical/sociological question then I do what research I can; it’s that simple. I went to church for a while as an “adult”, so that I could join a choir, and I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about, a lot of frivolous mumbo jumbo really. I am a practicing Atheist; I do celebrate the big Christian holidays like Christmas and Easter, except in a secular-almost-pagan way, celebrating the opportunity to be with family more than anything else. I am a third generation, non-theist and a second generation Atheist, no Grandma who tried to guilt me back into the faith, no parents threatening to disown me, I probably had a less stressful childhood than most, no fear of coming out to my parents (BTW I don’t actually intend to tell them as I am as of yet undecided but if I end up being serious enough with a woman to bring her home to meet the parents, I’m pretty sure they would roll with it) no confusion when learning evolution (in high school they had us divide into groups and each group would teach the rest of the class a section from the text book in the evolution unit—the video PZ posted on fish diversification in the Congo made a really good example—I totally rocked it) and most of all no fear of asking questions. Being an Atheist isn’t a bad thing especially when growing up, Atheist children are raised to think critically, to ask questions, to weigh social actions against social reactions as opposed to divine ones; In other words, I believe in thinking, I believe in learning, and I believe in not being a dick. Why do people have a problem with Atheists again?

E. Knight
Canada

Get out while you can, Catholics!

I’ve known a lot of wonderful people who are Catholics; I’ve even met some Catholic priests who do great and ennobling social work. And then there are all those ordinary American Catholics who ignore all the doctrine, like the ban on birth control, and yet keep on going to church every week. The one thing I always want to ask these people is…WHY DO YOU STILL SUPPORT THAT BACKWARD, MEDIEVAL NONSENSE? There’s such a tremendous disjoint between the thuggish, conservative church and these people’s lives that it is so wrong that they continue to support it.

Now Annie Laurie Gaylor hits one out of the park with an excellent open letter to liberal and nominal Catholics. Go read it, even if you’re an atheist already. If you’ve got Catholic family, forward it to them — it can be your ‘coming out’ announcement!

Also, the FFRF is trying to raise money to publish it as a full page ad in the NYT. Help them out. If nothing else, it’ll be hilarious watching Bill Donohue rupture himself in an apoplectic fit.

Those sleazy, lying Harvard Humanists

It’s been flabbergasting to see kooks jumping all over Richard Dawkins, all claiming that Dawkins is softening in his views (do follow that link to Paula Kirby’s article, it is most excellent), when he’s actually just saying the same thing he’s always said.

Now I’m experiencing a similar discombobulation. Last week I had a discussion with Greg Epstein on the radio, in which I said all the same things I’ve always said about religion. The question was “How should atheists talk about religion?”, and here’s a summary of the main points I tried to get across:

The answer is obvious: any and every way they want to. There is no dogma here, so there is no “should”: let a thousand voices roar. So we can have angry atheists and conciliatory atheists, and since there is no central authority, no pope of atheism, no one can say that one or the other is “wrong”. So, ultimately, there can be no disagreement between Greg and I except to acknowledge that we belong to different schools of thought on tactics and priorities.

Those differences, though, don’t mean I get to tell him how to manage his humanism or vice versa. Most of the strain between atheist communities comes from a perception that someone is disparaging our way: we more militant atheists get a lot of flak from the milquetoast atheists that we’re wrong, we’re driving believers away, we’re too obnoxious, that sort of thing…and it works both ways of course: we do things like call milquetoast atheists milquetoast atheists, and have little patience for soft and fluffy approaches.

But I think the final answer has to be that we need all approaches. I wrote something today that pointed that out: that what I favor is the combined arms approach to changing culture, and where I personally might favor the artillery for the biggest bangs, I know we need engineers now and then to repair and rebuild.

But here’s a central issue of contention: FAITH. No one word personifies the absolute worst and most wicked properties of religion better than that. Faith is mind-rot. It’s the poison that destroys critical thinking, undermines evidence, and leads people into lives dedicated to absurdity. It’s a parasite regarded as a virtue. I speak as a representative of the scientific faction of atheism: it’s one thing we simply cannot compromise on. Faith is wrong.

So then we see this one subgroup of atheists and humanists cheerfully endorsing the umbrella of “interfaith” and it drives us into a rage: it’s a betrayal. It’s an abandonment of a core principle of our atheism. We wonder what the heck is wrong with these people — it’s like being a dedicated pacifist and seeing like-minded war haters working with the Pentagon and saying good things about military drones.

I know the usual arguments: there are good religious people doing good work, and it’s a way to join in to those causes as secularists. And it’s true, there is no denying that there are good religious people…but they are laboring under a delusion, this nonsense of faith, and it’s pandering to the bad in order to do good. I can’t do that, and I won’t do that, `and I’ll confess, it annoys me to see atheists doing that. If they are religious people doing good work in the real world, then do it as a secular effort…don’t give the most foolish part of the endeavor credibility by calling it “interfaith”.

So today I got an email from the Harvard Humanists. You wanna see dishonest spin? I’m gonna show you dishonest spin.

Speaking of Humanists and tradition, Greg recently debated biologist PZ Myers, one of the most popular science/atheist bloggers, on the topic of “How should the atheist movement talk about religion?” Myers has at times been a fierce critic of Humanist community work but in this forceful showing, Greg won some major concessions as the two found a surprising degree of common ground. Check out the debate on our website here.

Epstein ignored everything I said and just sailed on over me. And now he’s going to claim he won some major concessions”? Was he even listening to what I said?

I think what he really meant to say in that email was that he learned that his caricature of the New Atheist position was false, so he did manage to hear some things we’ve always been saying this time. Unfortunately, now he’s trying to turn his blithe ignorance our position into a triumph, and selectively turning a blind eye to our differences.

This press release sounds like something from the Discovery Institute. It’s a completely dishonest representation of the discussion. We have not reconciled. And their freakishly fraudulent spin makes me trust them even less.