My talk at the Secular Student Alliance (given the day after the Creation “Museum” trip) is now available online. I think this video was put together by Ashley Paramore, whose smiling face appears near the end of the video — she was also one of several mischievous people who disobeyed a certain sign.
Do you need a nice calm godless hymn for a mellow Sunday morning? Here you go.
Our trip to the Creation “Museum” was sponsored and organized by the Secular Student Alliance, a wonderful organization that helps build and support freethought on college campuses all across the country. The meeting this past weekend, for instance, was for training student representatives in how to grow and maintain their campus groups.
I have good news and bad news, though.
Here’s the good news, and it is exceptional, wonderful, excellent news: secular student groups are booming, popping up all over the place, and there’s no end in sight. Look how SSA has grown:
The bad news, though, is a common problem for non-profits everywhere — the economy is doing poorly, and donations are declining. They are entirely dependent on the generosity of the supporters of freethought, and we’re all feeling the pinch.
If you can, make a donation or join — every little bit helps. There are a lot of us and our numbers are growing, and if we all just shared a little, then maybe income would be a slightly better approximation to membership growth.
More details are available in a pdf online. Check it out and do what you can.
I’ll be departing the Secular Student Alliance conference shortly, to spend most of my day traveling back home. I have to say a few things about it, though:
This was a good meeting! What the student attendees get is some excellent training in how to organize and maintain an active student group, and it’s worth it to go. If you want to fire up a gang of campus freethinkers, you should think about coming next time.
It was exceptionally well-organized: talks were paced well, everything was kept moving at a good clip, and plenty of time was left between talks for schmoozing. And the talks all started on time!
I stayed in the dorms with the students, and it was an interesting experience. There was a time in my youth when I could stay up until 4am talking, too.
The SSA is a great organization, but they’re hurting for money (like many non-profits right now). Maybe you aren’t a student, so you aren’t planning to go to their meetings—but that just means you can maybe afford to donate a few bucks to the cause.
For your entertainment, I’ll leave you with an example of one talk, by Hemant Mehta, who discussed something of importance to godless college students: dating. He has some tips here.
I told him he’s doing it all wrong. The best way is to pick the prettiest girl in your neighborhood when you’re in third grade, follow her around for 10 years or so, and then ask her to marry you after a few dates. It worked for me!
Against my advice, the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers ran an incredibly offensive ad on city buses in De Moines featuring naked lesbians masturbating with Bibles.
No, wait, that wasn’t it. It was an ad announcing that god hated Christians and they were all going to burn in hell.
No, I don’t think that was it. It was an ad offering free bacon to anyone willing to deny the Holy Spirit, and the Iowa vegans were outraged.
Nah, don’t think so. Actually, the horrible, awful, evil ad they were running was this one:
That’s it? “Don’t believe in God? You aren’t alone”? That’s the ad that some people found offensive? So offensive that the ad was promptly yanked from city buses, and Governor Chet Culver announced that he was “disturbed, personally” by them?
That’s insane. What’s the matter with those Iowans? One day they do something to make us proud, the next they do something so petty and stupid.
Look, it’s a clear case. There was absolutely nothing offensive about those ads, nothing that would make the horses skittish or frighten the children. Somewhere down the line, a few intolerant ignoramuses freaked out and started phoning the bus company, and a coward or a zealot somewhere in the chain of command saw an excuse to shut down a harmless advertisement. It’s bigotry, plain and simple.
By the way, there’s also a poll:
Do you think it was right for DART to remove the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers ads from its busses?
Yes
21.6%
No
78.4%
It’s going the right way, at least…but could be better.
Cobb County, Georgia is infamous for its efforts a few years ago to slap a warning sticker on biology textbooks, which might have given the impression that it’s full of southern yahoos. However, intelligent people and godless people are everywhere, including Cobb County, and they now have another claim to fame: a local atheist, Edward Buckner, used the opening invocation of a county board meeting to deliver a godless homily. It’s not bad; you can hear it online. He spoke for all the people who do not attend church, and who do not want their government interfering in religion, and decried the ‘hypocritical piety’ of using a board meeting to promote a faith. He also closed by telling people that if they resented his point of view being expressed at the meeting, they should urge county officials to stop using the meeting to discuss religion and philosophy.
Of course some people were annoyed.
County board of commissioners chairman Sam Olens, reached by phone Wednesday night, said he was offended by Buckner’s actions.
“Did I find his comments repugnant and insulting? Yes,” Olens said. “He abused the process by giving an opinion … rather than providing inspiration.”
I do not find prayers at all inspiring, but I thought Buckner’s comments were thoughtful and interesting, and a better way to start a meeting than conjuring up an invisible spirit. I predict, however, that Olens is completely incapable of seeing his prayers the way we do, as also repugnant and insulting. That we’ve tolerated such nonsense for so long does not mean we have to continue to sit silently while parasites mumble incantations, and it’s a good opportunity for people like Olens to have the situation turned about so that they need to learn some tolerance themselves.
Remember, docility and deference is what they want, a little stiffening of the backbone is what we need.
He has an excellent ending line, too: “I’m about to get angry at everyone who isn’t angry.”
Sam Harris has published a piece in the New York Times decrying the appointment of Francis Collins to head the NIH. It’s strong stuff; he points out that Collins isn’t just a Christian, he’s an active science-denier who has set aside whole blocks of scientific inquiry as inaccessible to study because they are a product of a divine being. As he asks at the end, “Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?”
The strongest part of the essay, in my opinion, was that Harris directly quotes Collins’ own words, and they are not encouraging. Most specifically, he includes the text of slides from a talk Collins gave at UC Berkeley in 2008:
Slide 1: “Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.”
Slide 2: “God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.”
Slide 3: “After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced ‘house’ (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the moral law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.”
Slide 4: “We humans used our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.”
Slide 5: “If the moral law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?”
My jaw just dropped when I read that. It is breathtakingly vacuous. How does Francis Collins know any of that? Those conclusions are not anything we could draw from any scientific evidence, and there’s the head of the human genome project throwing around quaint Christian dogma as if it were reasonable and valid.
That last one really irritates, too — it’s the familiar anti-atheist canard that atheists cannot know any truly moral behavior, that the only genuine sense of morality arises out of obedience to an authority, especially an invisible but omnipotent authority. Collins is a man who does not trust the godless people in his communities because, to his mind, they are blind to good and evil.
I know evil when I see it. A priest taking advantage of his presumed moral authority to take young boys into the dark and private rooms of his church to rape them is evil, I think. Not because a god has whispered a rule into my head, but because I know that the successful relationships that build a cooperative network within the framework of my society are all formed on mutual trust, and that is a violation. We test these bonds of mutual support all the time, we rely on them, and we know from history that their loss contributes to social decay.
We also contain biological imperatives that strengthen those bonds. We know good when we see it, too: kindness, self-sacrifice, and charity move us, not because we are ordered to do so by an imaginary god, but because we can feel empathy for others, and yes, evolution has shaped individuals to respond with affirmation to actions that reinforce the community. That’s how we survive and succeed.
I have to turn Collins’ statement around against him. If god does not exist, if religion is a byproduct of the evolution of the mind, then there is no reason to obey him. It’s all an illusion. You’ve been hoodwinked. Are you devout Christians really prepared to live your lives in reality? And if you aren’t, why should we trust you in positions of power?
I have been abandoned. My wife has left me. The kids have all moved out. I’m stuck home alone with nothing to do but work and take care of the annoying cats for a whole week, and I may just go insane.
The Trophy Wife has gone to summer camp! She’s working for a week as a camp counselor at Minnesota’s Camp Quest, the secular place for smart kids to be. I’m thinking I should probably demand, as a price for forcing me to bach it for all this time, some kind of direct report from her at the end of the week that I could post here and get everyone excited about sending their kids (or spouses) away for a while.
I’d say that I should get her to send me daily updates on the events there, but I think she’s going to be busy. As it is, all I’ve heard so far is that they have luxurious new cabins and great food. I had leftover tuna casserole for dinner last night, just sayin’.
