An Australian double standard

In March, there’s going to be a massive atheist conference in Melbourne, Australia. It’s going to be excellent, with speakers being brought in from around the world, and with mobs of delighted godless Aussies gathering to celebrate and discuss secularism (I know some of my readers here will be there!) Reasonably enough, the Atheist Organization of Australia has asked the government to chip in and help them do it right with a request for about a quarter million dollars. The government has been dragging its feet, though, punting the request about and making no promises.

Now you might say that times are tough, the economy is down, the government might just be strapped and is cutting corners. In that case, I’d say, OK, we atheists have to do some penny-pinching too, it’s only fair.

But then how to explain the fact that the Australian government just blithely handed over $2.5 million for a religious conference? And has flatly rejected the bid for funding from the atheists?

Government spokesman Luke Enright said: “The decision not to fund this event has nothing to do with religious ideology – the convention just doesn’t meet the criteria required to receive government funding”.

What’s the Australian word for “bullshit”, people?

Pile it higher, Australians!

Reverend Tim Costello, a patron of the world’s religions event, said it was important to support the forum, as “90 per cent of the world is deeply religious”.

“In a global context, most of the world is profoundly religious, and there literally can’t be peace without religious peace,” Mr Costello said.

Have you ever noticed that Christians like to count Communists as atheists when recounting the evils done in the name of that ideology, but whenever they make the argument from popularity, as Costello is doing here, they suddenly forget the Chinese? It’s very strange.

I also think he’s lying. A majority of the world is casually religious, not deeply or profoundly. I’d go further: most of the people in this world are stupidly religious, with ingrained beliefs that they did not acquire through thought or study, but through regular indoctrination from childhood on.

We also will not have peace through religion. Religion is arbitrary, false, and unverifiable; it is a body of ideas with no empirical restraint, that can be freely invented, and in the worst cases, inspire dangerous fanaticism. We will not have peace while religion is uncaged.

It does not matter, though. The fact that atheists are a minority does not argue that they deserve no consideration at all. I thought this was a well understood principle; the danger in a democracy is the tyranny of the majority, and safeguards have to be put in place to protect the rights of minorities. Since Costello is a “reverend”, unfortunately, that probably means he’s an ignorant ass who has never learned anything that matters.

A wicked twist

Michael Young was a nasty old Christian bigot who lived a long life and left his fortune to his relatives. Apparently,though, fundamentalist hate isn’t necessarily heritable, and one of those relatives, who I think is named Anthony Perry, established the Michael Young Fund, and is handing out the money to…well, follow the link. Let’s just say it’s a good thing there is no afterlife, or he’d be seething in even greater torment.

Just to forestall the usual whines, what if this happened to me, and I left money to my kids and one of them used the capital to hand out cash to organizations I disliked? I’d be dead, first of all, so I wouldn’t care; and I would leave what little money have to my kids to do with as they’d like, not as I’d like, so I wouldn’t have grounds to complain anyway.

Happy Wary Vigilance Day!

Sorry, I don’t believe in Thanksgiving Day.

This whole notion that one should have vague and aimless feelings of gratitude for the nature of one’s existence is just too weird, and the bow-your-head-at-the-table and radiate-blessings-at-the-cosmos tradition is pointless and silly. Don’t get me wrong: I can be appropriately and happily grateful to people who have gone out of their way to do good for me — Mom will get a phone call, and my wife will get a hug, and they really are appreciated — but for the most part, our existence is not the product of selfless altruism, and there is nothing out there that can be aware of just how glad you are to be alive, no matter how fawning and fulsome you may be.

The universe is cold and uncaring. You may be grateful that you weren’t vaporized by a meteor falling out of the sky this year, but there’s no agent out there who will feel pleased that you noticed, and the fact of your general relief that your existence continues will not be a factor in the motion of space rocks in the next year. I am happy that the microbes didn’t turn me into a pile of putrefying goo yet, but it wasn’t an act of thoughtful kindness on their part, since the little bastards are doing their best to get past my defenses all the time, and all that’s keeping them at bay is my constant expenditure of energy to keep my immune system at readiness. And they’ll also get me one day, for sure…unless that meteor vaporizes me into a cloud of inorganic molecules with minimal nutritional value first.

We’re all doomed. We are currently survivors by luck, sustained by selfish processes, and I don’t thank luck, because she (if she were an autonomous self-aware agent, and she isn’t) will turn for me or against me without concern for my feelings. Nature is not appeasable, get over it.

That poor bird that most of you will have on your dining room table is a perfect metaphor. It went through its life dumb and mostly content, getting its feed shoveled in front of its face every day, and then last week the machineries of profit began to move, and it found itself trussed on an assembly line. Then a gang of people who were mostly concerned with trudging through another day and making a living wage decapitated it, gouged out its guts, stripped off its feathers, and wrapped it in plastic so you could thoughtlessly stuff fragments of its carcass into your hungry maw. The universe did not rotate about that bird, and neither does it spin about you.

If you’re eating tofurkey, you aren’t off the hook, either. Think of the soybeans!

So don’t sit at your table and think you’re being good by warmly thanking an indifferent universe for whatever. It doesn’t care. Don’t beam happy thoughts at the farmers who stocked your larder — they can’t hear you, and they did it for their own personal profit anyway. Above all, don’t be hypocritical and radiate gratitude at the corpse of the turkey, since it’s dead and during its brief life would rather you hadn’t fueled the market forces that led to its execution.

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It would be far wiser to sit at that table and contemplate the threats to your existence, and scheme about how you’re going to get them first.

Oh, and you probably do have people who have done good things for you, at personal cost, and without carrying out the calculus of profit. If you want to have a day of thankfulness, thank them personally. None of this nonsense of bland, undirected, unfocused, smug gratitude. Share human feelings with other human beings.

Also, gods don’t exist, so they haven’t done squat for you. Don’t waste your time praying to them, either.

Some people seem to be misreading this, and think I’m telling everyone to have a bad day. Wrong: have a grand old day off, I know I am. Just forget this silly business of feeling blindly thankful. Gratitude is to be shared between sentient beings.

If you’re feeling this strange sensation of being grateful for existence or for good fortune, though, I wonder…would you be resentful of nonexistence, or place blame for random bad luck?

Greg Epstein is a very nice fellow

I’ve met him a few times, and that’s the impression I get in person and in his writings, and I certainly can’t object to that. I haven’t yet read his new book, Good Without God, but I’m pretty sure I’ll come away from it as I would from a heaping plate of marzipan and sugar cookies and chocolate truffles — a little nibble is plenty, and it’s all sweet and lovely, but I sure wouldn’t want to make a habit of it. And it can get cloying fast. But someone will like it.

There’s a very nice article about Epstein and his book in the Boston Phoenix (See? Again, every time, “nice” is the word that comes to the tongue). I think his message is fine for the people who want the tensions and edges blurred out, and I trust that many will be receptive to his book. But, you know, the journalist asked for my opinion, and I summarized it fairly well, I think.

“I think it is very, very nice of Greg Epstein to want to ape religion, and maybe there will even be some people who find his ideas appealing,” Myers tells the Phoenix via e-mail. “However, I’d remind him that just as we can be good without god, we can also be good without rituals, good without sacraments, [and] good without priests and chaplains. … I can appreciate that he’s offering a small step away from the old superstitions, but we can go so much further.”

Epstein can offer an itty-bitty votive candle wrapped in the form of familiar rituals, and I can appreciate that he is trying to bring a little light into the world. I prefer the lightning, and the carbon arc lamp, and the laser, myself…and the kind of illumination that sends the cockroaches of old dogma scuttling off to hide.

Mr Deity and the stereotype

Uh-oh. This episode of Mr Deity will fire up some denunciations. Take a deep breath, and remember, he’s satirizing religious attitudes.

Listen through to the end, though — he has an excellent suggestion. This weekend is Thanksgiving, and instead of sitting through another football game, put a Mr Deity episode on, and get the whole extended family talking about irreverence. Come on, it’ll be fun! There might even be a food fight!

The problem of the oblivious white male atheist

I have to recommend this criticism of sexism in the skeptical community: skeptifem points out that while we’re quick to outrage when someone like Bill Maher violates science norms, we seem to shrug off the fact that he’s been rudely anti-woman at times.

When someone does try to share the perspective of being a person of color or a woman in skeptic communities the majority of people in the groups I have encountered dismiss their viewpoint on extremely typical grounds. This article from richarddawkins.net has some really disturbing comments that illustrate exactly what I am getting at; an automatic opposition to the voices of people of color and women. Disagreeing isn’t the problem here, it is the outright dismissal and unwillingness to ask questions in order to understand the point of view she puts forward here. Having an actual discussion, or an actual willingness to understand her and then disagreeing would be a very different picture.

It’s a strange phenomenon. I don’t think the leaders of the atheist movement are consciously anti-feminist at all; it’s more a matter of being confident that equality is the right answer, appreciating everyone, male or female, working to promote rationalism in society, and then smugly assuming we’re done when we’re not. The Big Catches to bring in to an atheist meeting are people like Dawkins and Dennett and Hitchens — people who deserve their popularity and their reputations — but the women of atheism seem to be semi-invisible. Why aren’t we reaching out to, for instance, Susan Jacoby, and making her a more prominent face in atheism? She’s a wonderful writer, produced a book, Freethinkers, that was part of the early wave of godless writings, and every time I’ve heard her speak, she says interesting and challenging things.

The problem isn’t dismissal. It’s casual disregard. It’s being just enough pro-feminist that we lose sight of the real problems that women and people of color face.

One thing that would really help, I think, is if the grassroots spoke out a little bit more to remind us. Tell us who you want to hear who isn’t pale-skinned and full of testosterone; I’m not an organizer of meetings — I just get roped into these things — but one thing we noisy voices of atheism can do is name-drop when we get called, and ask if the inviting organization has considered X, Y, and Z for a lecture, too. So tell me in the comments: who are the deserving voices of the godless community who should be heard as much as the heterogametic ones who get all the press?

Skepticon II

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It’s another travel day for me tomorrow — I’m off to Skepticon II in Springfield, Missouri, where I’ll be joining a whole group of interesting people. I notice I’m going to be giving two talks (hey, JT, nice surprise!), which shouldn’t be a problem. The first one is going to be important: I’ll be announcing the amazing atheist speciation event that has gone on without our knowing it, and afterwards we have to run off and breed madly, since obviously the only way an intellectual movement can expand is by brute force proliferative procreation. It should be fun! Now don’t you wish you’d registered?

I’ll have to think about what I’m going to say for the second talk. Maybe I should just spend an hour introducing Rebecca Watson, who gets to bring down the curtain on the whole affair. Otherwise, I’ll just throw together a few slides and do an impromptu godless science talk. That’s always easy.

Intolerance in Cincinnati

This is not too surprising: Cincinnati fanatics and kooks were so threatened by a billboard that said, “Don’t believe in god? You are not alone” that they made violent threats that led to the billboard being taken down and relocated.

Cincinnati is Ken Ham country; you don’t see atheists sending in threats to get his billboards taken down. We’d rather see new billboards go up in reply.

Another of those polls that should be 100%:0%

Atheists are putting up a billboard in Lakeland, Florida that says, “Don’t believe in god? You aren’t alone.” This is, apparently, controversial, and the newspaper article has an accompanying poll.

Does an atheist group have a right to display their own billboard?

Yes  77.7%
No  22.3%

I’d say that’s a really stupid poll question, except that it reveals that 22% of the respondents don’t think a number of their fellow citizens don’t have the same privileges they do.