Notice that “Santiago” in my name? That’s because I am a semi-professional magician and “Santiago” is my performing persona. This is relevant. You see it was my research in to magic that put the final nail in the coffin of religious and supernatural belief for me.

I grew up marginally Christian. I went to church with my grandmother on Sundays. I used to think it was simply an excuse to get my brother and I out of the house so my parents could sleep in. But I enjoyed spending the time with my grandmother and we always when to brunch after at a little greasy spoon sort of place which seemed like a treat to me.

During the school week I also attended a private Christian school which seemed much like any other school I went to with the simple addition of a Bible Studies grade and an assembly every Friday morning.

But it was under these conditions that my doubts began. There was a certain amount of history involved in our studies of the Bible. You can do a little if one doesn’t go too far but that history was starting to not work together with what I was learning in Church. I was always a curious kid so I began asking questions.

Of course no one had any really good answers.

I also began studying science in earnest. My interest was largely focused on astronomy, biology and psychology. These areas of interest only increased the number of questions that I had.

I can even remember one of my teachers saying that if I kept working at it hard I could become a scientist and maybe discover evidence for god! I was in sixth grade at the time.

The questions kept coming and they kept not being answered. For years that was the story. I kept reading and studying science and the more I read the more I doubted.

But I was so sure that there had to be something that instead of getting out of religion entirely I turned from one to another. I began looking into various pagan practices. This didn’t last that long because the ‘magic’ that they were supposed to be engaging in was already familiar to me as interesting artifacts of psychology, a study I had been engaged in for some time.

Eventually I left that private school and went to a public high school. And to give credit where credit is due the academic education I received while at the private school actually did serve me very well. I had been taken out of the public school system because I was falling behind and put in the private school by my parents who saw it as a way to help me catch up. My parents really weren’t very religious at all so they only saw the school in terms of its academic offerings which were actually very high. Upon emerging I found myself well ahead of the curve for entry back into the public school system as a high school freshman.

I was still, however, engaged in some of that magical thinking of religion and supernatural belief.

I truly began to extricate myself when I started to learn the art of the magician. You see I was interested in the history of magic as much as in the art and I began to do more research. Well, if you go far enough back in time you quickly find that magic, science and religion were all completely intertwined with each other and it didn’t take me long to bump into that.

That was the lynchpin.

In the process of unraveling the art of the entertainer, the psychology of magic and religion, the science of deception I began to put all the tools together that I had already had for so long into one complete bundle. I was looking at the world in a way that included the facts about how the world really is, the wonder in what the world really has to offer and the skills of someone who can, for a time, seem to bend reality to his will for good or ill.

Science, especially the science of psychology, was the tool I was putting to use to both entertain and enlighten people. I started with debunking ‘psychic’ claims and of course discovered a new hero in the person of James Randi and a seemingly endless host of villains led by the likes of John Edward, Sylvia Brown and James van Praagh. As a fan of magic I was already familiar with Penn & Teller as well as what was ultimately the tragic story of Doug Henning.

I dug into the realm of séance and spirit mediums after discovering that my great grandfather actually was a spiritualist minister. Of course Houdini was my friend and companion along that journey.

Then there was Reginald Scott. He had one of the coolest keys of all. Who is Reginald Scott? In 1584 he wrote a book called “The Discoveries of Witchcraft.” It was the first book written in English which specifically targeted the bunk and trickery people used to convince others that they had supernatural powers. It included a full section describing the tricks of the magician.

It was a book so controversial that King James the First (he of King James Bible fame) got as many copies together as he could and had them burned.

There is a lesson for you.

And why I am an atheist.

Tim “Santiago” Converse
United States

“Frühstuck!” I said.

She started rattling off a list of words that included “-brot” and “-fleisch” and “-käse” and a lot of other utterly unrecognizable phrases.

I simply said, “Ja” to each. It was easy.

Thus I ended up with a platter of meat and cheese, and a basket of assorted bread, and a cup of strong dark coffee, und Ich beginnen mit the gut fressen. And it was real bread, with texture and flavor and a wonderful flaky crust, Gott sei dank. Ausgezeichnet!

I may not be able to leave this country, at this rate. Just the thought of the pale bland gooey Minnesota version of “bread” fills me with revulsion.

But I don’t know how I’d react if I saw something like this Papst-Bier:

I might be contractually obligated to drink it, so I can desecrate it by passing it through my heathen kidneys.

For instance, I will not participate in any conference in which Abbie Smith is a speaker. If I’m invited, and later discover that she is also invited, I will politely turn down the offer.

I could find myself spending a lot more time at home, which wouldn’t be bad at all, except that she doesn’t get invited out that often, and her coterie of slimy acolytes are virtual non-entities, too. It is a positive aspect of the growing atheist movement that it tends to be progressive, egalitarian, and not particularly supportive of shrieking over-privileged children.

Now I have to stroll out to a bäckerei for coffee and pastries.

At some point, I shall have to emerge from my restful nest and forage. Germans have beer and food, right?

“Atheists, agnostics and religious of all forms are believers and all have faith. The question is not whether they are believers but rather, what they believe in,” he says and insists the “new atheists” such as the late Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, who pride themselves on “not having any beliefs,” are wrong.

“Atheists are men and women of faith. Their faiths are different but they are still faiths and their beliefs still beliefs, no matter how much Dawkins and those like him wish it was different. Humans are stuck being believers, and that’s all there is to it,” he says.

We pride ourselves on not having any beliefs? Really? I have lots of beliefs, and I question them whenever necessary; I also expect my beliefs to be supported by evidence. I believe the earth orbits the sun, and I have evidence for that. I believe the earth is 4½ billion years old, and I have evidence for that. I believe life evolved, and I have evidence for that.

I don’t have faith, though, unless you’re willing to redefine “faith” to such a degree that it has no relationship at all to what theists mean by the term.

Here’s the problem: it’s not belief, because of course everyone has beliefs. It’s false beliefs. It’s beliefs that contradict reality, or are internally self-contradictory, or dogmatic beliefs that cannot be revised in the face of new evidence. Atheists try their best to get rid of those (although even there, we’re not perfect), while theists like Benson embrace such nonsensical jibber-jabber enthusiastically, and try to use their demonstrably false beliefs to guide public policy.

We all have a body of common beliefs: you’ll die if you jump out of a tenth story window, you should have a competent mechanic check out that used car you’re planning to buy, we can learn more about the world by observing and testing it. These are the set of pragmatic beliefs that allow all of us to function from day to day.

Then there are the set of entirely bogus and nonsensical religious beliefs layered on top of the useful common beliefs: you will live after death, a god cares about what you do in the privacy of your bed, we’re all damned sinners who will go to hell unless we belief in a zombie blood sacrifice. Sensible people reject those.

Although “dogmatic” doesn’t necessarily mean being rude, common usage helps prevent any real understanding of what dogma is. “Which is why so many atheists and men and women in the street think, like Dawkins and Hitchens, they don’t believe in anything. But they do.”

But a lack of understanding has enabled contemporary atheists to present their belief system as the only one that should have public recognition, forcing their own so called “non beliefs” on others.

No, you can believe whatever you want. What you can’t do is determine public policy by your dogma, which poorly reflects the realities of the physical world, nor can you use the state to indoctrinate children into your set of falsehoods.

Contrary to Benson’s freaky views, atheists aren’t trying to demand that politicians and teachers be atheists — we insist that they be secular. Big difference. Use secular principles to work out what is best for people in the material world. Weirdly, Benson seems to understand what “secular” means.

“We need to reclaim the true meaning of the ‘secular,’” Professor Benson says, pointing out that the word is misunderstood in today’s world and taken to mean “non-religious” when its real meaning, and legal definition is derived from the Latin word “saeculum” meaning “world.”

“Secular was used historically to distinguish between those things that were deemed to be ‘in the world’ and those that were expressly and technically ‘religious,’” he explains using the Catholic tradition to distinguish “secular priests” or those who work “in the world” from “religious” for those men and women who have taken specific religious vows and may live a cloistered life.

Yeeeeeessss? Atheists know what “secular” means. Perhaps Mr Benson should talk to a few sometime — his babblings reveal a profound ignorance.

According to Professor Benson, religious believers have as much right as anyone else to function in society according to these beliefs.

“Likewise religious institutions have as much right as non-religious institutions. Everyone has a belief system of some sort and those who draw on religious sources should not be put at a disadvantage,” he insists.

His support of equality for religious and secular institutions is commendable. Then I suppose he’d agree with me that the special privileges of tax exemptions and lack of regulatory oversight for changes should be abolished?

Since both religious people and atheists can share secular values, I don’t think it’s depriving the religious of their rights by insisting that everyone should be competent at their secular role; the special knowledge of religion/spirituality ought to have as much relevance to secular positions as knowledge of the rules of Dungeons & Dragons.

I was raised by agnostic parents. As you can imagine they taught me about religion, but did not teach me religion. They taught me about science, but they didn’t teach atheism. I was taught what my parents knew, not what they believed. This gave me the tools to decide whether or not gods exist, without being taught whether or not they exist. You might expect that this would inevitably lead to atheism. However, I did not absorb the rationalism and scientific thinking my parents probably wanted me to have until my teenage years. I did not identify myself as an atheist until I was seventeen years old.

The story of my becoming an atheist starts when I was in primary school. Between being eight and thirteen years of age I got up very early in the morning, before my parents or my brother. Consequently, every morning there was a period of a couple of hours in which I went unsupervised. Early morning television in Australia on channel 10 at that time was the Benny Hinn Show (This Is Your Day), and for some unimaginable reason I watched this instead of whatever else was on television. The consequences of a child of my age watching such dribble unsupervised are easy to imagine, I ate it up. At some time, when I was nine or ten years old I think, I actually attempted to reach out to God/Jesus with faith. From my first year of school until that time I was a victim of bullying, and I prayed for it to stop. As absolutely all the empirical studies on the effects of prayer would predict, absolutely nothing happened. The bullying persisted long enough for me to decide God did not exist in the form of a prayer answering, loving, omnipotent being (and long after). Bullying only really stopped midway through high school, at the same time I was becoming known at my school for not being Christian.

By the time I was fourteen years old I identified myself as non-religious. I only really became aware of this after a girl I sat next to in Society and Environment class tried to evangelise me. The experience seemingly universal amongst atheists of trying to justify their lack of belief in the personal god of whoever they are talking to began for me with this girl, and persisted until high school ended. We used arguments as inane and overused as can be expected for fourteen year olds. My teacher didn’t want to seem like he was ignoring his duty to stop us talking and make us do our work, so he made sure to tell us to stop arguing and get back to work before he pulled up a chair to spectate. I continued to call myself non-religious until a sudden bout of self denial.

When I was fifteen I suddenly got into the philosophy of Spinoza. I became interested in it because Spinoza’s lesser known idea of not expecting anything from life helped me get out of the all too common depression which many teenagers experience. Unfortunately I also took up the idea which his name is usually connected with, pantheism. Pantheism let me feel like the universe was magical and caring while still not believing in deities. It represents one of the most attractive beliefs someone who cannot believe in gods can have. I think of my short time as a pantheist as being a failing of my mind. For a couple of years I avoided the prejudice against atheists and the lack of divine feeling at the expense of better thinking. Just before finishing high school this stopped, and I finally reached what I hope is the conclusion of the evolution of my spiritual beliefs. I started to identify myself as an atheist.

It was the internet which helped me become okay with labelling myself an atheist. Names like Thunderf00t, dprjones, AronRa, Matt Dillahunty, and PZ Myers were to thank for reinforcing my belief that theism is nonsense. Also to blame was how creationists at my high school would use their Christianity to attack science. I think I demonstrated to the people at my high school that I was never going to be ‘saved’ when one of them said to me that science is a tool of Satan. I spent the whole night researching the tangible effects science has had on the world, sent him an email outlying these things science has achieved, and concluded by labelling the removal of science as the most evil and cruel thing any person could possibly do.

Now I am at university studying science. I have been able to surround myself with fellow rationalists and have never been happier. I am constantly reminded of the power of science now that I have access to peer reviewed literature and am given wonderful practicals from the life sciences department. The constant nonsense of the evangelists and creationists at high school is now just a bad memory. Atheism has taken me to a place where I am welcome and happy. I am sure religion has taken the Christians from my high school somewhere which feels the same way for them as well. But I am being taken to a lifetime of learning, while they are taken to a lifetime of blind belief.

Jacob Davis
Australia

I have an ulterior motive for wishing to contribute to Gove’s scheme. People who do not know the Bible well have been gulled into thinking it is a good guide to morality. This mistaken view may have motivated the "millionaire Conservative party donors". I have even heard the cynically misanthropic opinion that, without the Bible as a moral compass, people would have no restraint against murder, theft and mayhem. The surest way to disabuse yourself of this pernicious falsehood is to read the Bible itself.

The Bible really is a great evangelical tool for atheists. It is such a wicked book of lies and bad advice that it handily discredits Christian claims of righteousness.

He goes a little too far, though, declaring it a great work of literature, and I have to disagree with that. Fragments of the book are excellent, but the bulk of it is simply awful, incoherent stuff, on a par with Twilight novels and fascist propaganda. It’s simply been hallowed by tradition and history, but really…we should be able to do better.

To no one’s surprise, I’m sure, Salt Lake City is the most religious major city.

This guy is a talented pro — I hope more atheist organizations tap into his skills (he made one of the best videos of the Reason Rally, for instance.)

(Episode CCCXXVIII: No remorse.)

I witnessed an excellent example of this irrational and contemptible behavior at a debate on Friday, in which Christopher DiCarlo and Matt Dillahunty debated a couple of forgettable Christian philosophers on the subject of the existence of gods. At one point, the Christians derailed everything by going after DiCarlo with a ludicrous question: is there an objective morality that determines whether you would torture a toddler? I don’t think DiCarlo addressed it particularly well — he’s got a whole book that discusses ethics, and it’s tricky to distill a book down into a few seconds that fit into a debate format — but the upshot was that our dim little Christians openly accused the atheists of being “MORAL NIHILISTS!” because they do not accept the imaginary words of a god that say that killing babies is wrong.

If I were confronted with such a question, I would say that no, I would not torture toddlers because I do live by an objective set of moral principles that allow me to assess whether an action is moral or not. It is not a subjective morality; I do not reject torture of toddlers or anyone else because I think it is icky (although, of course, I do), but because it breaks my moral code.

Here’s my objective, ungodly moral reasoning that I use to assess the rightness of an action. Let’s call this the basics of an objective humanist morality.

1. Interest. Am I even interested in carrying out a particular action? There’s a wide range of possible actions I can take at all times, and all of them have consequences. In this realm of possibilities, most options never come up: I have never been in situation where I desire or am compelled to torture a toddler, nor can I imagine a likely scenario for such an activity. It is a non-decision; my default choice is to not torture, and the only time the choice comes up is in bizarre abstract questions by not-very-bright philosophers.

2. Consent. If I’m contemplating an action, I’d next consider whether all participants agree to engage in the action. If it isn’t consensual, it probably isn’t a good idea.

   Where does this value come from? Not gods, but self-interest. I do not want things done to me against my will, so I participate in a social contract that requires me to respect others’ autonomy as well. I also find a non-coercive, cooperative culture to better facilitate human flourishing.

3. Harm. I avoid behaviors that cause harm to others.

   Again, this is not done because an authority told me to do no harm, but is derived from self-interest and empathy. I do not want to be harmed, so I should not harm others. And because I, like most human beings, have empathy, seeing harm done to others causes me genuine distress.

4. Stigma. This should be the least of my four reasons, but face it, sometimes we are constrained by convention. There are activities we all are interested in doing, that do no harm and may be done with consenting partners, but we keep them private or restrain ourselves to some degree because law or fashion demand it.

   These are human and social constraints, not at all divine, and are also not universal or absolute — they can and do change over time. And sometimes, when cultural biases cause harm, I think we have a moral obligation to change the culture.

My rules are not perfect, of course. Sometimes they can conflict. Imagine a situation where consent can’t be obtained, but inaction will cause harm; a child getting a vaccination, for instance. Conversely, you can have cases where there is consent to do harm to some degree: a sadomasochistic sexual relationship, or a prophylactic mastectomy for a woman at high risk of breast cancer. But many decisions, especially the simplistic gotcha games of shallow Christian philosophers, are objectively resolved very easily. Torturing toddlers, for instance, violates all four of my principles hard. I have no problem at all in explaining that I have very good, non-subjective reasons for not abusing children, and that Jesus doesn’t come into play in any of them.

The Christians, on the other hand, also have a protocol for deciding the rightness of an action: they consult their bible or their priest. I’d agree that they also have an objective morality — it’s just not a very good one, because I think most Christians also implicitly follow my four rules, and unfortunately, biblical morality often directly contradicts humanist morality. For instance, the bible endorses killing children and raping virgin girls: it literally tells believers that there are situations in which it is permissible to torture toddlers, making the Christian debaters’ question remarkably ironic. Vox Day, for example, has explicitly said that if the voices in his head (which he calls “God”) told him to kill people, he would do so. He apparently lives by a different moral standard than ethically more advanced human beings do.

These Christians, though, are simply taking my fourth point, the very least of the criteria I use to make moral decisions and the one I most feel comfortable about opposing, and making it the whole of their ethics.

In another example of the dishonest Christian gotcha, lately a thick-skulled Christian idiot name Rick Warden has been pestering me with email and comments demanding that I justify support for bestiality. Seriously, dude? What the fuck is wrong with you?

Mr Warden is so obsessed with bestiality that he even claims the Friday Cephalopod is a “weekly animal sex post” in one of his incessant whines about my odious imaginary support for bestiality. He’s a shockingly dishonest asshole; he does fit my expectations of Christian liars for Jesus, though, who think nothing of accusing atheists of being moral nihilists who approve of torturing toddlers, or of being promiscuous goat-rapers.

I do not support bestiality. No one I know does. But we are capable of assessing it objectively, unlike these wretched Christians and their brains full of lies and disgust. Let’s apply my moral tools to the problem.

1. Sorry, I have no interest at all in having sex with animals. I think sexual behavior is a fascinating subject and enjoy the diversity of sexual patterns I observe in nature, but I have never had the slightest desire to join in. Of course, since there are so many different ways that human beings have sex that I also have no interest in sharing, that I have to say that my disinterest is not an argument against allowing it.

2. Most animals will not consent to sex with a human (and vice versa), and will respond with violent opposition to any attempt to do so. Consent is much more complicated with animals, though: cows do not consent to be turned into hamburgers, but we do it anyway.

   It’s also the case that some domesticated and intelligent animals seem to be willing to participate in sexual activity with humans — dolphins and dogs, for example. It is possible to find animals who demonstrate a willingness to participate in sex play. Within that narrow band of possibilities, I’d have to say that this criterion doesn’t provide an argument against sex with animals in all cases.

3. I oppose causing harm to animals unless there is an opportunity for significant gain (sorry, while I can be absolute in opposing harm to humans, I do not make the same argument for animals.) Having recreational sex with an animal is not a gain significant enough to justify causing it harm, however. So most instances of bestiality must be opposed for the same reason.

   Some forms of animal sex play do not cause harm to either participant, though, so again in that limited domain of behavior, I cannot make an objection.

4. Zoophilia has strong cultural stigma and is against the law in many (but not all!) states and countries. Given my total lack of interest in sexual activity with animals, this is more than sufficient incentive to avoid such activities. Also, given the absence of any vocal lobby arguing for the their right to participate in bestiality, I’m not feeling any need to change cultural taboos. I do feel that bestiality is adequately addressed by laws against cruelty to animals.

So, to answer clueless thick-skulled Christian idiot’s question, I don’t object to bestiality in a very limited set of specific conditions, but do not support it in any way. My position is rooted in objective moral principles other than the dogma of the bible, and is defensible as a reasonable approach based on improving the welfare of all participants in an activity. I also reject his question as a clear ploy to label critics of his dogma as goat-fuckers — and as such, his whole game is fallacious and deeply dishonest.

So what else is new? He’s a fundamentalist Christian.

Robert Huckabee
United States

Now what I expect to happen, though, is that this long list of speakers — Lauren Becker, Ophelia Benson, Jamila Bey, Greta Christina, R. Elisabeth Cornwell, Margaret Downey, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Debbie Goddard, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Melody Hensley, Sikivu Hutchinson, Susan Jacoby, Jennifer McCreight, Bernice Sandler, Wafa Sultan, and Rebecca Watson — will receive greater recognition, and at the next conferences I attend, more of them will be invited, and I’ll be hearing much more from them.

The first talk was by Susan Jacoby (author of The Age of American Unreason and Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism), entitled “The Dearth of Women in the Secular Movement: Let’s Look in the Mirror”

I unfortunately missed the first half of Jacoby’s talk, but she seemed all over the place. Jumping from discussing the history of secularism and feminism to the difference between the atheism and skepticism movements (the skeptic movement tending to be more conservative and male-oriented) to the recent case of an Arizona Catholic high school softball team forfeiting because the other team had a girl on it. I was having a hard time finding a cohesive theme in her talk. Rocky start to the conference, IMO.

This was made up for by the next session, a panel moderated by Annie Laurie Gaylor, with Ophelia Benson, Sikivu Hutchinson, Jennifer McCreight, and Rebecca Watson: “The Intersection of Non-theism and Feminism”.

Hutchinson provided a welcome racial minority perspective here. She talked about how disproportionately affected by sexism minority women were and are; how historically black women’s reproduction was strictly controlled by slave owners, how black and Hispanic women are seen as “dangerous breeders” and the recent laws regarding “chemical endangerment” and such are targeting them. I don’t think she really established a link between what she was talking about and secularism, but it was interesting nonetheless.

Hutchinson also criticised the secular movement for promoting scientism, saying that scientism generally excludes racial minorities and women, even throwing out the accusation of white supremacy.

Watson and McCreight discussed their experiences with introducing feminism into atheism/skepticism, and the backlash that results. The complaint when they do so is basically “this is not science/atheism, so it doesn’t belong here”. McCreight made the case that the goals are similar. Religious belief is irrational and not fact-based, and so is sexist belief. If your goal is to promote rational thinking, feminism is an inevitable part of that. But unfortunately, the difference between the two is that giving up religion feels freeing, whereas giving up sexist beliefs often feels more restricting.

Benson talked about how at some point, some of the feminist movement stopped pushing for equality, and embraced a “Okay, we’re not equal, but we’re different in good ways” attitude, which created the common stereotypes of women being more caring, better at emotions, more family-oriented, and so on. This attitude, perpetuated by a lot of women’s studies academics, has been harmful to women in secularism since none of these supposedly “good” stereotypes are advantageous for secular activism, so women are passed over.

The next talk was by the new head of the Secular Coalition for America, Edwina Rogers: “Religiously Motivated Legislation Particularly Harms Women”. Turns out the title was misleading. This 15-minute talk served more as an advertisement for the SCA. Most of it was discussing plans to expand to more states, the staff structure of the organisation, affiliated organisations, and so on. Then she whizzed through lists of the issues that SCA is focused on lobbying about — contraceptive access, violence against women, pharmacist and employer exemptions, and so on. She had to be somewhere else, so she couldn’t do a longer talk, but I’m not convinced that was a bad thing.

Next up was Annie Laurie Gaylor, “The History of Women in Freethought”. Great talk. I had no idea the extent to which women had been involved in the past. It’s sad how many of these women have been forgotten, and it wasn’t due to lack of contribution.

She talked about how the women’s rights movement was founded by female freethinkers. Since the lack of legal rights and lower social standing that women had were of biblical origin, it was the women who left religion who were the first to speak up.

She gave brief bios of a large number of female freethinkers: Anne Hutchinson (the first female heretic in North America, excluding Native Americans), Mary Wollstonecraft (who wrote the first book talking about women’s rights), Frances Wright (“Turn your churches into halls of science, exchange your teachers of faith for expounders of nature”), Ernestine L. Rose (who had a large hand in the Married Women’s Property Act), Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage (who founded the first feminist organisation to advocate separation of church and state).

Josephine K. Henry, Clara Colby, Lillie Devereux Blake, Mathilde Amneke, Ella Elvira Gibson, Helen H. Gardener, Harriet Marineau, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, George Eliot (Marian Evans), Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée), Sharlot Hall, Elmina D. Slenker, Zona Gale, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Lucy N. Coleman, Etta Semple, Susan H. Wixon, Marilla M. Ricker, Annie Besant, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Margret Sanger, Marian Noel Sherman, Dora Russell, Meridel le Sueur, Queen Silver, Margaret Knight, Butterfly McQueen, Vashti Cromwell McCollum, Ruth Hurmence Green, Catherine Fahringer, Barbara Smoker, Meg Bowman, Barbara G. Walker, Madalyn O’Hair, Kay Nolte Smith, Anne Nicol Gaylor, Sherry Matulis, Sonia Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Katha Pollitt, Taslima Nasrin, Alice Walker, Ursula K. LeGuin, Wendy Kaminer, Ann Dryuan, Natalie Angier, Sara Paretsky, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Robin Morgan, Julia Sweeney, Jamila Bey, Susan Jacoby, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Sikivu Hutchinson, Jessica Ahlquist.

So much for the “there haven’t been very many female atheist activists” excuse for not being able to name five. For more on the subject, Gaylor has a book called Women Without Superstition.

So I’ll conclude part 1 here, and have part 2 up shortly, but there was something else I wanted to talk about. During the previously mentioned panel, Jen mentioned getting emails from women warning her about which male speakers at secular conferences that women should avoid. And from my talking with other people at the conference, it sounds like there are quite a few stories of well-known speakers being misogynistic or sleazy.

That’s a problem. It’s a problem that anyone is behaving that way, and it’s a problem that they’re not being called out on it. Several times the importance of calling people out on their actions was discussed at this conference, but this just isn’t being done.

If the issue is that individuals who’ve had these experiences are worried about backlash, or career suicide, I’m sure we could work out a way of anonymously publishing at least some of this information. If the issue is a fear of hurting the secular movement at large, I just don’t think that’s something to be greatly concerned about. So a speaker is called out for his comments or actions — they have the option to admit wrong and apologise, or to defend themselves, or to deny it. But at least there will be some amount of accountability. It might deter future misconduct, and conference organisers and attendees can make an informed choice about who to invite or support. There’s no shortage of good speakers to replace them.

Seriously, we need to do something about this.

I suspect it will all go smoothly (and the new site is looking good) except for a little bit of drama. NatGeo has informed Abbie Smith that they want the ERV slimepit posts taken down, according to Abbie’s own account on facebook. There are various accusations as well that it’s us here at FtB who are responsible for the complaints that are bringing it down — which is not true. All along, NatGeo has been telling me that there will be new Standards & Practices rules at the National Geographic-branded Scienceblogs site — it’s why I took proactive steps to move all of the new godless anti-religion content to the new site at Freethoughtblogs. I’ve said since last August that there were posts that bugged our new NatGeo overlords, and that there were changes coming.

Abbie Smith is in denial. Now, in addition to implying that Sb crew at FtB are responsible for shutting down the slimepit, she claims I’ve been lying about the imminent changes.

NatGeo have been just fine. Not being sarcastic. PZ was blatantly *lying* about censorship from NatGeo last year.

So I said NatGeo would be lightly censoring content last year. This year, NatGeo is telling Abbie Smith to censor some offensive posts. Therefore, in Abbie Smith’s world, I was lying when I said NatGeo would be asking us to censor some content.

I don’t get it.

I’m going to have to insist that Lt. Connlann Myers also be allowed to attend. He’s based in California, it shouldn’t be a problem.

(via Ark in Space.)

(Also on Sb)

I also noticed that the author had to explain that his technique works best when you’re asleep. Nice — I should contribute an article explaining my amazing mental power, called “dreaming”.

Being the kind of guy I am, I jumped straight to the article about evil powers. It wasn’t very helpful.

Dark Bomb

First take all of your energy and convert it into darkness, if you dont have energy then you should draw mana from the darkness. Then lift your hands over your head and pull all the darkness energy into your hands. You should do this until it is feeling very heavy. Then make it unstable by making it to where it will explode on contact. To do this simply imagine it like a bomb. Then throw it hard against a target or down on the ground. It will hurt you and everything else in its way.

It’s got 350 comments, and they aren’t all “Bwahahahahaha!” There are people enthusing over using this power against bunny rabbits and people — somehow, the idea of some nerd concentrating really hard and waving his hands at me (or a bunny) doesn’t scare me very much.

(via rationalbrain.)

No correlation with experience. There are far too many holes in the theory, if you will. Its a simple as that.

KillJoy

But OK, I’ll just steal something someone else drew: here’s a picture of Mohammed by Rashid al-Din, a 14th century Persian. That should do the job.

Or you could just read Jesus and Mo for a while.

I think we’ll be having an evening of the remnants of the Imagine No Religion 2 crew and speakers and attendees chattering happily over alcohol. Look me up if you’re still around.

We have literally stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi. Three blocks from the Capitol sits the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi. A bill was drafted. It said, if you would perform an abortion in the state of Mississippi, you must be a certified OB/GYN and you must have admitting privileges to a hospital. Anybody here in the medical field knows how hard it is to get admitting privileges to a hospital…

It’s going to be challenged, of course, in the Supreme Court and all — but literally, we stopped abortion in the state of Mississippi, legally, without having to– Roe vs. Wade. So we’ve done that. I was proud of it. The governor signed it into law. And of course, there you have the other side. They’re like, ‘Well, the poor pitiful women that can’t afford to go out of state are just going to start doing them at home with a coat hanger.’ That’s what we’ve heard over and over and over.

But hey, you have to have moral values. You have to start somewhere, and that’s what we’ve decided to do. This became law and the governor signed it, and I think for one time, we were first in the nation in the state of Mississippi.

“You have to have moral values.” I agree. I truly wish Bubba Carpenter had some.

It’s not just coathangers. Poor women will also use clorox, turpentine, quinine, misoprostol, and back-alley butchers. They’ll bleed out, they’ll have perforated bowels, they’ll suffer unbearable agony, they’ll die. These are “moral values” at work. And note that he even acknowledges the other inequity: if they’re wealthy enough to go out of state (read: Republican), they won’t have to worry about the coathanger. This is open warfare on both women and the poor.

Bubba let slip the naked truth about the Republican agenda. The video of his statement is on youtube, but I suspect it won’t be for long: they’re scrambling to hide it away right now. I suppose it’s good that they exhibit a little shame, but it seems to be embarrassment that they were caught openly expressing what they think, not shame at their callousness.

Our church and even the whole denomination was bible-focused. As the song says, we knew Jesus loved us because the bible told us so. The bible was the proof. God had inspired men to write down his words so we would know how to live. Sermons and Sunday school lessons were each based on a passage or even a single sentence or phrase from the bible. The bible wasn’t just a historical document for describing the relationship between God and man, it was a communications device that God could use to get a message to individual people. God would tell the preacher or the Sunday school teacher what passage to use and what lesson to emphasize, and it would be a specific message for someone in the group. This view of the bible as all-important, inerrant, and magical is what led to my loss of faith.

I was a good student of the bible. I did well in bible-quiz (a Q & A game for xian youth), and during my first year in grad school, I read the whole bible – front to back. That is where the problem came. I couldn’t get over the problems with the genealogy from Adam or Abraham, through David to Jesus. First, what is the point since it traces the line to Joseph, husband of Mary, but not Jesus’ father? Secondly, the two versions are very different. Of course I wasn’t the first to notice this, but I had not read the apologists’ spins, and so for me it was a discovery of a clear error of fact. I had long before settled that the days in Genesis were ages long enough for evolution to occur, so I had no problem interpreting the bible to mean what I was told it should mean. But this genealogy thing was a clear error. If God told men what to write in the bible, why would he have let them make this mistake? Thus, it was clear then that it was not God, but men who had written the bible. If this part was wrong and made up by men, then what else was wrong and made up by men? Could any of it be believed? No. I had to admit it. My religion was based on the writings of a bunch of men, men who got stuff wrong and put in words to support their own agendas. I was so angry for having been deluded all that time, and I was so sad, because this change would tear me from my family.

I have always loved the truth. So in the end I felt better knowing that the bible was just made up. I no longer had to go through the mental contortions to try to make its words fit with reality. Atheism also made for a more consistent world view. It fit with there being so many different religions (people just made them up) and why there was disease and suffering and injustice (there is no omnipotent being to stop them). So now I work to understand and cure disease. In grad school I loved to sequence genes, because there is truth in those coded instructions. There is no way to spin or misinterpret a DNA sequence, it either is that sequence or it is not, and you can find out what it is.

As a scientist and as a citizen, I try to work for good in the world. Since there is no god, we are the only ones who can make things better. If we let people destroy the environment, there will be no god to fix it. If we let injustices occur, there will be no retribution for the perpetrators in hell. If we let people suffer, there will be no balm for them in heaven. I feel empathy for the good religious people of all types – it is not their fault they were lied to. But I look forward to a time when these delusions are gone and never taught again, a time when everyone will work for the good of all people and we can all enjoy the one life that we each have.

Joe

In a new piece at the HuffPo (I’d rather not link to that place, so read it through Jerry Coyne, who ably deconstructs Wilson), he lays out three points comparing ERS to the New Atheism, and his third point is this: that the New Atheism ignores the scientific evidence.

Whenever New Atheists make claims about religion as a human phenomenon, their claims should respect the authority of empirical evidence. Insofar as the new discipline of ERS has added to empirical knowledge of religion, the New Atheists should be paying close attention to ERS. This is especially true for Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, whose names are so closely associated with evolution. Step 3 should go without saying and I doubt that anyone would disagree with it in principle. Yet, by my assessment, there is a serious disconnect between the New Atheism and ERS at the level of Step 3.

To back this up, he uses an example from Dawkins who clearly explains the byproduct theory of religion, and shorts him because he doesn’t fluff David Sloan Wilson’s pet idea, that “religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities”. I note that Dawkins also did not seriously discuss the Catholic church’s theory that the one true religion is the product of divine fiat, either.

What if he had said that religions are fundamentally about the creation and organization of prosocial communities? That all people require a cultural meaning system to organize their experience, receiving environmental information as input and resulting in effective action as output? That all cultural meaning systems confront a complex tradeoff between the factual content of a given belief and its effect upon action? That secular meaning systems often depart from factual reality in their own ways? The effect upon the audience would have been very different than when they were told that religion is like a moth immolating itself or like a child mindlessly being fed useless information.

This is why Dawkins has a reputation as an excellent communicator, and David Sloan Wilson does not. That humans process data using a mental model shaped by cultural influences is simply a given, a kind of common property of the substrate that does not say anything about the special status of religion in poisoning (or more charitably, shaping) our cultures. It does not increase understanding. And most importantly, it does not address the problem of religion, or beliefs that lead entire cultures into benighted dead-ends of onanistic inanity.

The feline fanatic has a succinct summary of the New Atheist agenda. I concur with this:

1. Testing whether the tenets of religion are true. The New Atheist answer is “no.”

2. Assessing the effects of ungrounded religious belief on the world. The New Atheist conclusion is that, seen as a whole, religions have inflicted far more harm than good on the world.

3. Getting rid of the unwarranted authority and privilege that religion, established churches, and religious officials have garnered for themselves over the centuries.

Even David Sloan Wilson would agree with the first point: religions teach false dogma about the origin and nature of the world. He is reduced to making pragmatic arguments that false beliefs can have beneficial effects on society.

But I have one word for David Sloan Wilson’s benign view of religion, for his argument that it is a prosocial phenomenon. It represents a huge pile of evidence for our second agenda item that he seems to ignore. That word is…

WOMEN.

Whenever I hear that tripe about the beneficial effects of religion on human cultural evolution, it’s useful to note that the world’s dominant faiths all hardcode directly into their core beliefs the idea that women are unclean, inferior, weak, and responsible for the failings of mankind…that even their omnipotent, all-loving god regards women as lesser creatures not fit to be intermediaries with him, and that their cosmic fate is to be subservient slaves to men, just as men are to be subservient slaves to capital-H Him.

David Sloan Wilson can argue all he wants that religion helped promote group survival in our evolutionary history, or that his group selectionist models somehow explain its origins, but it doesn’t matter. Here and now, everywhere, those with eyes to see can see for themselves that religion has for thousands of years perpetuated the oppression of half our species. Half of the great minds our peoples have produced have lived and died unknown and forgotten, their educations neglected, their lives spent doing laundry and other menial tasks for men — their merits unrecognized and buried under lies promulgated by religion, in cultures soaked in the destructive myths of faith which codify misogyny and give it a godly blessing.

Isn’t that reason enough to tear down the cathedrals — that with this one far-reaching, difficult change to our cultures, we double human potential?

In college I joined Campus Crusade for Christ and their bible study my freshman year. As a biology and anthropology major I got really into websites like Answers in Genesis (embarrassing as it is to admit) in an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance between what I had been taught as a child and what I was learning in my courses. In the middle of college I was severely depressed for about a year and a half, and my religion didn’t really do much to help me through that. About the same time as I was coming out of the depression I went on a summer study program and made a new set of friends that were into the regular party scene. At that point I decided that since “God” hadn’t been there for me when I was down, I was going to do whatever made me happy from that point on without regard for what might be a “sin”. For a while I continued with Campus Crusade and lived a bit of a double life, but then they decided their next student leader was going to be a guy that I had been on study abroad with who had been nothing but rude and disrespectful the whole time. In disgust I stopped attending any of their events.

As I prepared to return home from school I tried to look for some answers in the biblical book of Job, but the only answer I found was that the god of the bible was a jackass. I saw a youtube video (Goon Project) on Job and that settled my views on that. At that point the only reason I still considered myself a Christian was because I was too terrified of the alternative. When I returned to my hometown, I read the newspaper regularly, and after four years away, the letters to the editor appalled me with the amount of religious intolerance and hypocrisy shown. This along with my dad pushing me and my high school experiences kept me from reconnecting with my parents’ church. One day, I think in the newspaper, I saw something about the book “parenting beyond belief” I went to the website and started reading it, and from there started reading other atheist websites (including this one). Once I saw that life without religion was pretty normal and non-terrifying, and that religion wasn’t necessary for happiness, morality, or purpose, my need for Christianity fell away. One morning I woke up and realized I didn’t believe in “God” anymore. With a feeling of relief I almost instantly got rid of the mental gymnastics keeping me from “belief” in evolution as well as the “gays are sinning” viewpoint and all the other negative beliefs that came automatically with my religion.

Kelly Pyle
United States