Why I am an atheist – Holly

I am an atheist because, if I am to be an honest person, it is the only way I am able to be.

When I was struggling with trying to be Christian in my early 20’s, other Christians who knew I was struggling would tell me to “have faith” and “it will come with time” if I just believe. I was subtly told that I was over-thinking the whole question. (What does it mean to “over-think”?) I tried to be open to God, but I couldn’t stop “over-thinking”. I pleaded with God to reveal himself to me and wondered what was wrong with me that he never did. I wasn’t even asking for much of a sign–I didn’t want a burning bush or a miracle, I just wanted a feeling like so many Christians I knew claimed they had–a feeling of knowing the “truth” and knowing that God was there with me.

I never got such a feeling and I slowly came around to the idea that maybe there was nothing wrong with me. Maybe the reason I wasn’t picking up God’s signal was not because I was a poor receptor but because he wasn’t actually there. The moment I let myself think that, I was on a very quick path to atheism. My “eureka” moment was not “God does not exist” but rather, “I don’t have to believe in God.” It seems obvious to me now, but at the time it was a real revelation (so to speak). I started to see faith for what it is: not the noble, humble position as it is touted, but a lie to oneself–deliberate deceit self-imposed in order to believe in something that’s not true.

I’ve recently become not only an atheist, but an “out” atheist. I talk about it with the religious members of my family. I say it outright if someone asks me if I belong to a church. I updated my facebook “philosophy” to read “atheist” (this was surprisingly difficult for me for whatever reason). I’ve even told a handful of my students when they’ve asked. This newfound zeal came about this year when my husband and I started looking for resources on raising our 3-year-old daughter without religion. We want to raise her to not be afraid–of being different, of being creative, of being smart, of being rational. And so I had to stop and examine how I was living my life and I saw that I had been hiding. I didn’t believe, but I sometimes pretended I did to avoid conflict. I was noncommittal or weakly compromising at best and untruthful at worst, and I don’t want to raise my daughter to think that’s OK.

I became an atheist to be honest with myself and so I had to come out as an atheist to be honest with others.

We teach by example, so I’m working to be an example worth learning from.

Holly
United States

Dear Jezebel

There’s a reason I promote atheism and skepticism coupled with feminism, and it’s not because I’m trying to foist a feminist ideology on skepticism. It’s because skepticism drives me to consider discrimination and injustice as wrong, not just in an abstract moral sense, but unjustifiable and invalid. If I am in any sense a feminist, it is because I am a skeptic, not vice versa. And I think the best way to achieve equality for women, and for minorities of all kinds, is to view the world rationally, empirically, and as objectively as possible. It’s the people who try to justify everything with their biases and gut feelings and falsified opinions that have gotten us in our current mess.

So it really pains me to see the website Jezebel take a big step backwards and publish a ghastly gullible bit of fluff that endorses nonsense, titled “Worth It: A Homeopathic Pain Reliever That Actually Works“.

Sorry, but it doesn’t.

The author thinks it does, but mild pain can be a highly subjective phenomenon, and a little delusion goes a long way in persuading someone to ignore a sensation. The stuff she was playing with is called Arnica, and it’s based on an herbal remedy that’s supposed to have pain-relieving qualities, similar to aspirin. homeopathic arnica has been tested in double-blind, controlled studies, and as you might guess, when the patient doesn’t have the preconception that the little pill will cure their pain, it doesn’t cure the pain. It’s indistinguishable from placebo.

These pills contain 30c arnica, lactose, and sucrose. 30c is the dilution: the arnica is diluted to one part in 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This is the equivalent of 1ml of arnica dispersed into a cube 100 light years on a side. There ain’t no arnica in it. It’s a sugar pill.

The author also plugs arnica gel, which is not homeopathic, but it is a bit vague about the concentration; it’s a 7% solution of I-don’t-know-what. This could do something. Arnica contains thymol, which is fungicidal and antibiotic. It’s effect on pain has been tested in double-blind, controlled studies, with ambiguous results: one study finds a weak analgesic effect, but recommends it be used together with aspirin (which had a stronger effect). Another study found that arnica actually increased pain. This isn’t too surprising, either: “arnica” is a plant, the active agent, whatever it is, hasn’t been identified or purified, so what people are getting is a variable assortment of complex molecules in variable concentrations.

Maybe it actually works. I wouldn’t be surprised — after all, willow bark extracts were also found to alleviate pain. But science tracked down the active ingredient in that willow bark, acetylsalicylic acid, and have been able to work with the pure agent and also analyze the mechanism of action. Arnica? Who knows. Why people are willing to slather on a mystery mix of miscellaneous plant toxins, but get all squeamish at the idea of pharmaceutical chemicals, is a total mystery to me.

But that doesn’t matter. What we’ve got here is one author credulously and enthusiastically peddling a homeopathic nostrum on the basis of subjective personal anecdotes. An n of 1, no controls, no blind experiments, just one person pushing boxes of sugar pills at $8.29 each. And on top of all that, read the comments: lots of people are pushing back and explaining that homeopathy can’t work (excellent!), and others are complaining about “nasty comments” and “rude comments” and getting huffy that skeptics would have the effrontery to expect better analysis.

How do you like this excuse?

Oh for heaven sake. This is not Science, it’s Cassie telling us it works for her. I don’t care if homeopathy is a quack if it works for people and they are happy about it. It’s ain’t that easy making placebo these days. She’s not telling you to cure cancer with homeopathy (and even id she did – you know better don’t do it!) she’s telling us that this gel and pills work for her pain. It’s just popular advice .

Feminism is best served by embracing reality, by thinking critically, and advancing rational arguments. This sloppy Newage shit-slurry of ingenuous gullibility is pure poison to the cause.

Now that’s rudeness. There’s nothing even close in the comments there.

(via Templeton Koala’s blog)

(Also on Sb)

African Americans for Humanism

I usually gripe about the esthetics of atheist billboards here, but I have to come right out and say it: African Americans for Humanism did good. Their whole campaign is attractive, positive, and tasteful. Heck, I’m Minnesota Pallid*, and I want to join them.

They have a speakers bureau. If you’re building an atheist/humanist/secular conference, look. I’ve heard less than half of them speak, and next time I’m at a conference I’d like to hear more.

*True fact. I had a routine checkup today, and the first thing the doctor said to me was “Boy, you’re pale”…which is a major accomplishment in Minnesota in February, to have a complexion so white that it elicits comment. I’d go outside and see the sun, but I’m also teaching a cancer course which makes me fearful of everything.

Home School Science Fair this NEXT weekend

Aaargh, I think I’m going to have to miss it again. Our local creationist organization is having its yearly creationist science fair at the Har-Mar Mall near Minneapolis on 18-19 February. You can check out photos from a few years back and see that it is typical grade school science stuff, mostly not very interesting with a few that look like the kids are actually thinking. That’s not to knock this fair; you could say the same of most of the secular science fairs.

The difference is 1) this fair requires you to have a Bible verse on your project, and 2) the purpose of the fair isn’t to promote science, it’s to evangelize Christianity.

1) To promote home schools,

2) To show that Homeschool students can do good science.

3) To present our science fair project to non-Christian people. This should be a great Gospel outreach.

We heard about one lady who saw the Science Fair displays at the Mall. She began to read some of the verses on the displays and was convicted to start attending church and get right with God. There are probably other stories like this we have not heard but it shows the power of God’s Word through our program.

Seriously? Look over their examples and their fair ideas. Do any of them look at all like they might convince you to follow Jesus?

Well, if they answered the question “What is God made of?” or better yet, “Why do we have pimples? Did God goof?”, maybe.

Why I am an atheist – Jonathan Judd

I would credit my atheism to an excellent education. I have had the opportunity to have been taught by many excellent teachers and professors who passed down to me the ability to think critically, ask questions, and to complete wide research to find answers. While I am not a scientist, my education provided me with a background in the scientific method, and a basic understanding about how the sciences can explain our natural world, and sometimes what others may call the “unexplainable.”

Because I was not as gifted in the sciences / mathematics areas, I chose study literature and writing. I found that through literature, there is a great deal of information and as that contributed to my atheism. I believe my first foray in to questioning the existence of god came about after reading Greek mythology in the 6th grade. After learning about all the myriad gods, goddesses, titans, nymphs, monsters, and super-powered heroes the Greeks once believed in, that they used to explain their world, I thought it might not be a stretch that in modern times, “god” was used by humans to explain our modern world. The Greeks once believed the titan Helios pulled the sun around the earth on the back of his flying chariot, when we now know that the Earth actually revolves around the sun.

My English teacher introduced our class to “Elmer Gantry” and “Inherit the Wind” in our freshman year of high school. I learned about the hypocrisy of believers, and how people can twist the Bible to fit their own needs and agendas. I found this was not only the case in modern times, and in reading Voltaire, I discovered that hypocrisy and religion have been travelling hand in hand for centuries. I discovered that promoting belief in a god or gods was also a route to power of those that promote dogma.

In college, I was introduced to Freud, and psychology. By reading further into the subject matter, I became aware of why people have a need or desire to believe in god, an afterlife, angels, or a higher power, why they have a need to feel some connection to the world around them. It can be difficult for the human brain to accept “not knowing,” and god and religion try to comfort those “discomforting” thoughts and feelings. I found that religion was there to soothe and coddle those who feel uncomfortable with life’s most difficult questions.

I am truly grateful for having been exposed to great teachers, who in turn exposed me to new ideas. Not telling me which may to go, but arming me with a variety of viewpoints to help me choose my own direction. I continue to use my educational experience to find new questions, and new answers, some that confirm thoughts, and others that help me to answers questions that others have.

Jonathan Judd

WTF?

Do you see anything wrong with this table?

It’s bizarre, and it’s posted on the BBC site. There have never been only two human beings on the planet. The “births since previous date” column is absurdly precise — I could see estimating the total at 100 billion, but 107,602,707,791? Jeez, was that 6:21pm tonight, or 6:25?

I hope the problem isn’t that the data comes from an American source.

(via Further Thoughts for the Day)

Zooming in on the Origin of Life Science Foundation

I’d been wondering about the credibility of David L. Abel, an Intelligent Design creationist who claims to work in the Department of ProtoBioCybernetics and ProtoBioSemiotics, Origin of Life Science Foundation, Inc. I tried to track down this foundation with the lofty title, the million dollar prize, and the elaborately specific departments, but the best I’d been able to do was find a google satellite image.

Huh. That looks suspiciously like a suburban house.

So then someone from the Evil Atheist Conspiracy’s vast network of spies and agents decided to drive by and get a picture.

Why, it is someone’s house at that address! It’s a nice but unpretentious little place in a residential suburb. There must be some mistake. This doesn’t look like a fantastic institute of advanced science — it’s got shady trees and a lawn and a basket of flowers by the garage and it looks like a typical two bedroom house.

But wait…what’s that by the hanging basket? It’s a sign of some sort. Look closer…

Yep, that’s the place.

That’s every intelligent design creationism institute of scientific thinking: a cheap sign tacked up on a garage, with some guy with delusions of competence twiddling his thumbs inside.

(Also on Sb)

Why I am an atheist – Beanpuff

I am an atheist, mainly because of the overwhelming evidence, but everybody says that so here’s the other reason: I’m happier without God. I hate the idea of my only purpose being to serve an all powerful being who I can’t communicate with. If it weren’t for that fact, I might not be writing this. In fact, I might be writing hate mail instead. But after a while I gradually realized that I don’t have to get my morality or purpose from god. I had always believed being fully aware that there was no supporting evidence, so I decided to stop believing altogether.

Also, Westboro Baptist was a pretty good deterrent.

Beanpuff

Anoka, our little blight on the prairie

Rolling Stone has an excellent article on One Town’s War on Gay Teens, featuring Minnesota’s own Anoka school district, where Michele Bachmann and the Minnesota Patriarchy Council hold sway. I recommend it highly, but I also warn you: it’s a hard read, since it personalizes the kids who killed themselves after incessant taunting and bullying. I choked up a few times myself.

I’m going to leave out any discussion of the kids, because I hate crying on my keyboard — go read it yourself, if you think you can take it — and want to focus on one issue. The Anoka school district claims that it has no responsibility at all in these deaths, and instead blames gay activists for driving these kids to suicide; how, I don’t know. It’s probably a variant of the same accusation atheists face, that it’s their own fault for being themselves and provoking critics by openly existing. They also occasionally mention that right-wingers are responsible, but that rings hollow, since at every step the district has been dancing to the fundamentalist Christians’ tune.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district’s policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, maintaining that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all students. “We are not a homophobic district, and to be vilified for this is very frustrating,” says superintendent Dennis Carlson, who blames right-wingers and gay activists for choosing the area as a battleground, describing the district as the victim in this fracas. “People are using kids as pawns in this political debate,” he says. “I find that abhorrent.”

Read further into the article, and there are all these little revelations that show that the district has been pandering thoughtlessly to the Religious Right all along; they are so thoroughly steeped in the cult of Christian conservatism that they are unconscious of the problem.

It had been a hard day: the annual “Day of Truth” had been held at school, an evangelical event then-sponsored by the anti-gay ministry Exodus International, whose mission is to usher gays back to wholeness and “victory in Christ” by converting them to heterosexuality. Day of Truth has been a font of controversy that has bounced in and out of the courts; its legality was affirmed last March, when a federal appeals court ruled that two Naperville, Illinois, high school students’ Day of Truth T-shirts reading BE HAPPY, NOT GAY were protected by their First Amendment rights. (However, the event, now sponsored by Focus on the Family, has been renamed “Day of Dialogue.”) Local churches had been touting the program, and students had obediently shown up at Anoka High School wearing day of truth T-shirts, preaching in the halls about the sin of homosexuality.

Every goddamn school district in this state gets these lying whores for Jesus showing up to do “assemblies”. Here in Morris we’ve had the “You can run, but you can’t hide” ministries show up, or other variants. They’ve usually got some ridiculous “cool teen” schtick — they’re body-builders or wrestlers or rappers — and they bill themselves as presenting a positive, anti-drug message, something that they can superficially pretend is secular, and then they turn on the prayer and Jesus babble, and it’s transparent as hell — these are simply evangelical Christians in crappy camouflage, and the schools just let them sail on in and preach to the students.

It seems to happen at some school around here every year. It’s repulsive. I often don’t hear about it until after the fact, because here’s another giveaway: they don’t advertise publicly, they advertise in the churches.

So the Anoka school district wants to claim that the anti-gay bullying is not their fault, but they annually have a “Day of Truth” led by Exodus International or now, Focus on the Family (as if that’s an improvement)? The district turns the hyenas loose in the hallways, but denies responsibility if someone gets chewed up.

It’s not just the students. The schools have gay teachers and staff, who are silenced, and the straight teachers lead the way in gagging any protest.

“There has been widespread confusion,” says Anoka-Hennepin teachers’ union president Julie Blaha. “You ask five people how to interpret the policy and you get five different answers.” Silenced by fear, gay teachers became more vigilant than ever to avoid mention of their personal lives, and in closeting themselves, they inadvertently ensured that many students had no real-life gay role models. “I was told by teachers, ‘You have to be careful, it’s really not safe for you to come out,'” says the psychologist Cashen, who is a lesbian. “I felt like I couldn’t have a picture of my family on my desk.” When teacher Jefferson Fietek was outed in the community paper, which referred to him as an “open homosexual,” he didn’t feel he could address the situation with his students even as they passed the newspaper around, tittering. When one finally asked, “Are you gay?” he panicked. “I was terrified to answer that question,” Fietek says. “I thought, ‘If I violate the policy, what’s going to happen to me?'”

The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys’ bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, “It was probably water.” Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, “Get out of this town, fag”; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.

The district is aware that there is a problem — dead kids are very bad PR — and has been waffling ineffectually about doing something or other. Pointless meetings are always the preferred solution for a bureaucracy.

Just to be on the safe side, however, the district held PowerPoint presentations in a handful of schools to train teachers how to defend gay students from harassment while also remaining neutral on homosexuality. One slide instructed teachers that if they hear gay slurs – say, the word “fag” – the best response is a tepid “That language is unacceptable in this school.” (“If a more authoritative response is needed,” the slide added, the teacher could continue with the stilted, almost apologetic explanation, “In this school we are required to welcome all people and to make them feel safe.”) But teachers were, of course, reminded to never show “personal support for GLBT people” in the classroom.

Never show personal support for GLBT kids. That’s the killer right there.

I have some suggestions for the Anoka school district that would be helpful. First, repudiate the Minnesota Family Council and Focus on the Family. These are hate groups that have no business advising the school administration; they should be recognized immediately as symptomatic of the bigotry problem they have. Second, adopt a strictly secular policy on all official school events. No more preachers, no more evangelical assemblies, no more church sponsorship of days or picnics or t-shirts or whatever the hell trick they try to pull. God is the poison here, get it out. That’s not to say that Christians must be oppressed, but that we need to learn that Christianity is a personal, private preference that does not instill a moral message. Third, crack down hard on the students: seeing a few bullying jocks getting kicked off the football team for cracking jokes about faggots would send a strong signal right there.

That’s a school district that definitely needs more atheists. Maybe the SSA needs to seed the place with a little rational thought.