I’ve gotten a few interesting questions when wearing my “atomic whirl” American Atheists necklace. Everything from “are you a chemist?” to “do you know your necklace is broken?” (the open loop at the bottom appears to some as if it has been broken) to “What is that?” I’d like to be able to field these kind of questions a bit more gracefully than I have in the past.
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Apr 27, 2010
Do You Have An Atheist “Elevator Speech”?
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Apr 24, 2010
Celebrating An Atheist Role Model
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In the United States today, most of us atheists are apostates from a family religion and grew up surrounded by religious role models. But atheists need roles models too. One of the big difficulties in leaving the religion of your family and community is in facing a (seeming) void of good role models who share your worldview. You may know of people who wrote some books, or interact with people online from a few states away, but not know atheistic people who live anywhere near you. For the atheist community this problem has been eased somewhat with the help of internet communications. First we could find other who think like us over the internet, and now many of us are using sites like Meetup.com to establish communities of people who we can actually know face-to-face.
Today I went to a memorial service for one great atheist role model we lost earlier this year. I’d never known Helen Kagin closely, but our paths did intersect. She played a key role in organizing the Rally for Reason protest at the opening of the “Creation Museum.” This was a big deal to me because, as you know if you read my blog often, evolution education is one of my big issues. I can’t help seeing the subversion of children’s education (which is what this sham of a museum does) as any less than a great travesty that must be addressed and exposed to ridicule.
(As a side note, my participation at the rally also landed me a picture on the cover of American Atheist Journal a few months later. I was not featured, but I was sitting right next to Nicole Smalkowski, who was facing discrimination in her school in Oklahoma for not reciting the “Lord’s Prayer” with her basketball team before games.)
My going to this event had the side effect of getting me back into regular involvement with the Louisville Atheists and Freethinkers Meetup. (I had gone a bit “apatheist” and had stopped going for a while.) I met a few atheists from Louisville at the group and found out that they had coordinated to come to the rally. Getting back into active involvement with other local atheists has had a wonderful effect on my life, including giving me the unforeseen opportunity to help organize group activities. Meeting with other atheists has been life-changing. If you grew up with a very narrow and biased view of atheists, that bias can still affect you and can affect your view of yourself even after you’ve been one yourself for several years. Interaction with other atheists has taught me a lot about how to live well as one.
I found the memorial to be very touching and inspiring. It was interesting that one of the major voices at the memorial was a close friend of Edwin and Helen Kagan, and also a Christian minister. I see in this a good deal of hope for how atheists (even activist atheists) and Christians can be friendly without glossing over our disagreements. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this minister belongs to a rather liberal denomination. I do think I’ve mentioned that liberal Christians can be really cool sometimes. 
A brief interaction with Helen Kagin affected my life in ways that she will never know. She is gone, but her legacy will live on for a long, long time. My story doesn’t even scratch the surface…To learn more about Helen Kagin, go to http://www.edwinkagin.com/Helen.htm.
Apr 22, 2010
What does “non-traditional” Christian mean?
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From such conversations and from my observations of church signs and such, it appears that the big trend in Christianity is to disavow old stuffy traditions and be cool and current and trendy. It’s nothing new to me–in fact, it was going on all though my teen years (the 1990′s). Apparently, from what I hear, church used to be boring and haughty and judgmental. The new radical Christianity is just all about loving people and accepting them the way they are. But what is particularly Christian about that? You get the same thing with other religions too, and in secular humanism! Human kindness is a human attribute, not some other-worldly spiritual attribute. [Read more...]
Apr 11, 2010
What does atheism have to do with evolution?
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In actual fact, very little. Let me explain.
At the American Atheists convention I wrote about in my previous post, I got a hear a few very good and thought-provoking speakers. One was Massimo Pigliucci, a scientist and professor who has advanced degrees in both biology and philosophy. There was something he said in his talk that was not shocking at all to me, but does disagree with the statements of some other big atheist names. That is, that atheism is a philosophical conclusion, not a scientific one. You can not infer that there is no god by looking only at the natural world. Which is not to say that he disagrees with the atheist position. He is one himself, and calls atheism a “imminently reasonable” conclusion, but a philosophical rather than scientific one.
I have put some thought into working out how evolution and religion have been set up against each other, and can offer some insight from my experience. My first exposure to the words “Theory of Evolution” was in a book called It Couldn’t Just Happen. I found it on a table at a convention for the Church of the Nazarene that I went to with my parents. I loved science, and this book had pictures of planets and animals and had beautiful glossy pictures like the science books I used at school. So I got my parents to buy it for me, and proceeded to practically memorize the entire text. I remember major points out of it even today, though I’ve not cracked the book open in about twenty years.
Here is the gist of the book: Life on the earth is far to special and complex to have just happened by chance. The theory of evolution is therefore impossible and is nothing more than a rebellion against God. Either the Earth and universe evolved (which we have demonstrated is absurd) or God created it. The God of the Bible, of course.
It was not until years later, in my college years, when I learned about the big bang and then read about evolution on my own that I discovered how totally wrong this book was. One of the multiple huge disillusionments I had about Christianity is that I realized I had been lied to and mislead about the scientific facts of the matter by a Christian author, for Christian purposes. And is was to me a huge betrayal of my trust.
My point here is that it was not authors like Richard Dawkins that linked science and evolution with atheism in my mind. It was authors like Lawrence O. Richards, who very early in my life linked evolution with rebellion against God. Richard Dawkins just confirmed what I had already been taught. And I think it bears some mentioning here that for fundamentalist believers, religion is a matter of scientific fact. If you take the biblical stories literally and seriously, it has to be. It’s not like it is that way for everyone, but the point needs to be made.
Now, if you are a non-fundamentalist Christian believer don’t get it into your head that since I accept that a religious believer can also be scientific that I’m going to convert back. There are lots and lots of other issues that would have to be addressed before I would give any religion even a sideways glance. Atheism may be a philosophical conclusion after all, but it is still one that is well informed by and consistent with scientific fact. In a way that religious belief is not.
Apr 5, 2010
Highlights from the 2010 American Atheists Convention
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This is the first time I’ve ever been to an atheist (or atheist related) convention. It was quite an exciting time, and I’ve come away with quite a lot of inspiration and ideas. What follows is not quite a full report but rather a skimming over of some of my favorite happenings at AACON 2010. It is also not strictly chronological.
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