Category Archives: KY State Fair

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Questions from Ky State Fair Visitors

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Tonight I had my second shift volunteering at the KySS/LAF Kentucky State Fair booth. It was a great evening, and there was lots of great conversations with both believers and unbelievers alike. Somewhat in contrast to last year, we have gotten less of the “drive by’s” (as described in my last post) and more Christians (and one Jewish guy) coming to chat and ask a lot of questions. I’m not sure if it is because we are doing something different a bit different this year or if the visitors at the fair are getting more used to our presence, but I have detected less hostility this year and a lot more of apparently honest and curious questions from the religious.

This is a sampling of the questions that fair visitors asked me while this year (and a brief version of my typical answer):

  • Are you atheists?

Yes, we are atheists.

  • Why don’t you believe in God?

Lack of any evidence or reasons to believe that such a person or being exists. This is not how I worded it, and I went into rather more detail in the booth, but it essentially comes down to this.

  • How do you know what is good without God?

We define “good” in human terms. We don’t need a god to know what is good.

  • So you believe the apes came first? (I had to pause a moment to avoid laughing at this one.)

Yes, I accept the theory of evolution as the best scientific explanation we have of how we came to be.

  • What does he (referring to the Darwin statue) have to do with the rest of this (referring to the rest of the booth)?

Darwin was an agnostic atheist (during at least the later part of his life) who made great scientific contributions to the world. Our booth features atheists and freethinkers who have contributed to the sciences, arts, and the advancement of human rights.

Watching unsuspecting state fair visitor’s reactions to the very lifelike statue of Charles Darwin standing in front of our booth…priceless.

  • What do you think happens when you die? (I was asked this at least 4 times by different people tonight.)

I think that when we die we cease to exist, same as the state we were in before we were born. The only part of us that lives on is the change that we made in the world. And I am totally content with that.

  • If there is no God then where did we come from?

Generally though natural scientific processes like evolution, but I don’t really have a quick and easy answer to that question. And I don’t need to have a quick and easy answer to that question. Just because we don’t know all the answers does not mean we should fall back on “God did it.”

  • If there is no God where did the universe come from?

I don’t know. And answering a question that you don’t know the answer to with “God did it” is a very poor way of dealing with the question.

  • Do you believe in the Big Bang?

I understand the Big Bang as the best supported scientific explanation so far of how the universe came to be. And then I explained some about the cosmic background radiation, expansion of the universe, the predictive power of scientific theory, and a bit about why scientists mostly accept the Big Bang today.

EDIT: Here are a couple of questions I was asked by a couple of Christian teenaged girls that found their way to our booth. (They also repeated some of the questions above.) I forgot to include these last night but that I don’t want to leave them out.  

  • Why are you here (that is, why do you have a booth at the state fair)?

Our primary reason for being here is to reach out other atheists and freethinkers who are surrounded by religion in their daily lives and may not know that there are other people in this state who see the world the way that they do. The social and psychological pressures on atheists can be enormous in a situation where we must hold our thoughts to ourselves for fear of judgment or worse, sometimes from people like parents and bosses who hold a lot of power over our lives.

  • (As a followup to the question above) What was the reaction from your family when they found out you were an atheist?

In answer to this I briefly recalled the story about how my Mom found “infidels.org” in our computer history and asking me why I had chosen the “church of the infidel.” Yes, my newly-found perspective on the truth was not well received in my childhood home, though I know of others who have received much worse from going against the religious opinions of their parents. It caused a lot of tension until I finally moved out and got my own place, and it was helpful for me to find other people that I could talk to about it. Fortunately today I have a good relationship with my Mom and we generally avoid talking about our disagreements on religion.

In general these were nice, productive exchanges and I have a feeling that several believers left the fair with at least one positive experience with an atheist.

 

More State Fair Conversations

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This post is a continuation of the last post on State Fair conversations. In the course of talking to the Evangelical woman and man who visited Wednesday night I also had an interesting conversation with the guy. This discussion was regarding the question of whether or not is was moral for God to cause/allow people to suffer. He offered the typical response I have heard to this question: that God has the right to do anything he wants with humans because he created us and he owns us. Then he gave this as an example: If he built a beautiful handcrafted chair, he would be perfectly in his right to chop it up with an axe and use it for firewood if he so desired. This is because he made the chair, and it is his to do with as he pleases.

This same sort of analogy of God’s ownership relation to humans is in the Bible too. In Romans Chapter 9, Paul compares humans to clay that is shaped by God (the potter) to whatever purpose God desires, even if it’s for the purpose of wrath and destruction. Paul also makes it clear in this passage that the purpose for which this clay is formed has nothing to do with either the desires or merits or “works” of the clay. The clay just has no right to talk back to the potter because, well, the potter is God and can do anything he wants with it. This is all very well when you are talking about clay and potters, but clay does not feel happiness or sorrow or pain or joy. Clay has no interests of its own — only the potter has interests in the clay.

Speaking of ownership rights, there is also a passage in Exodus (I said Leviticus before, but it’s actually Exodus 21:20) that says that slaveowners may beat their slaves without any reprisal, as long as the slave gets up again in a few days, because the slave is their property. (For a nice summary of slavery rules in the Bible, visit Bible Verses Rarely Read on Sunday.) In other words, as long as a person was considered property, the owner could do what he wanted to them, short of beating them to death. There was clearly no indication in the Bible that humans have any right to live free of the threat of pain and terror.

Since the comparison of humans to wooden chairs or to clay is obviously flawed, I offered up what I think is a much better analogy. Not too long ago there was a movie where the main character hears narration in his head that not his voice and it is driving him crazy. As it turns out, he is only a character in a book, whom the author intends to kill off in some horrible and tragic way at the end of the story. So I asked this question of this Christian guy: if you had the power to write a novel in which the characters were real people who had real families and feelings and who could feel pleasure and pain, do you think it would be alright for you to decide to just strike one of them with cancer or some other horrible painful disease? Or to harm them in other ways? After all you would be their creator, and you would own them.

When I asked him this, he was visibly uncomfortable and clearly saw that there was a problem with this scenario. It’s easy to say that you have the right to chop up a chair that you make and that you own, but clearly human beings and other sentient creatures are not like inanimate objects that do not suffer. He still tried to work around it and say it was different in God’s case. In response I said that it sounded to me like a rationalization for a really horrible and immoral belief, and he admitted that he could see why I would think that. So it looks like I got him to understand my point of view on the subject, and I was very happy with this conversation.

State Fair Conversations

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On Wednesday night I had another evening shift at the state fair booth. It was a fairly slow night, though Dave and I did have a few interesting conversations near the end of the day. A couple of young people who appeared to be probably in their 20′s came by to talk to us. They came up and started with a question something like “Do you think it’s always irrational to believe in God?” My response was that people have their own reasons for the things they believe, and whether or not their belief is rational depends on their reasons for their belief. As the conversation went on, we ended up talking about evolution in relation to morality, slavery in the Bible (she cautioned against taking the verses from the Bible about slaves out of context but looked bothered when I asked if slavery is good in any context), whether or not it is moral for God to cause suffering to his creatures because he made them, and how I went from being a Christian to an atheist.

At one point in the conversation, the woman said that the problem with atheists is that we worry too much about evidence. That we should just believe in spite of not knowing for sure. When she said this I asked her if she believed in heaven and hell, and she did. (Turns out she was an Evangelical, though I’ve learned to make no assumptions about what a person believes without asking first. ) Then I asked her, assuming we are supposed to believe without really knowing, what if a person is a believing Muslim? Would God let this person into heaven for their sincere belief in the face of uncertainty? Her response was that the Bible says that the only way to God is though Jesus, and I made my point that it would be unjust of God to punish someone for believing the wrong thing when we are expected to just believe and not seek and require evidence. We need evidence to determine what is most likely to be really true, rather that just believing what we having been told is true in our childhood or by our culture. Seriously, when the stakes are that high we shouldn’t take chances, right?

I left the conversation with the strong impression that she has probably not had exposure to any religion other than the one in which she was raised. The way she went on about “the Bible says” and talking about what is “Biblical” and such gave me that impression as well. I asked her what her basis was for believing the Bible, and she didn’t say much in reply. Hopefully our conversation gave her a few things to think about, whether it motivates her to refine her belief or eventually leave it.

The Atheist Booth at the Kentucky State Fair

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KySS KY State Fair Booth 2011For the second year in a row, there is a atheist-themed booth at the Kentucky State Fair. Last year, there was a billboard sponsored by the Coalition of Reason posted right outside the fairgrounds though the entire month of August that declared “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.” The billboard is what prompted the idea for us to have a matching state fair booth at the fair, along with a banner to match the billboard (now being displayed in our current booth at the front of the display table.

Last year we got some media attention, mainly around the billboard but also with the fair booth as a followup story. But don’t think we are saddened by the lack of media attention this year–when people are no longer shocked at the “atheist booth” and get used to the fact that we are here, that is a sign of progress.

My first shift at the booth was on Friday evening, from 6-10. The way the shifts are scheduled, there are 2-3 people there for each shift. Just as last year, we have had no trouble at all finding members who are willing to step up and volunteer, and the shift schedule was filled out just about a week in advance of the fair’s opening date. Having multiple volunteers there makes it a lot more fun than if there were only one person, and it is invaluable for moral support and input in case any debates arise, and they always do. There is one main purpose to the booth, to reach out to our fellow secular citizens and let them know we are here. However we also make the most of the discussions with those who disagree with us. With Kentucky being a majority Christian state, we always have people coming by our booth who are not so pleased at our message. The responses have ranged from a puckered facial expression after they read our banner to declarations that “one day every knee will bow!” And of course, we do get asked from time to time if we are worried about hell, to which I would say “there is no hell.” We also have had long and frank and civil discussions about everything from where morals and values come from to the reliability (or lack thereof) of the Bible to whether or not America is a Christian nation. And the way I see it, regardless of the outcomes of these discussions it is a very positive thing for the religious to be in discussions with atheists in person, rather than only hearing what the preachers and the media have to say about us. We are putting a live, breathing, speaking human face on atheism in Kentucky.

And the discussions are great, but the best reward that we see daily are the surprised “thumbs-ups” and the grateful expressions of someone coming by and saying “I thought I was the only atheist in Kentucky.” This is the prize that makes all of the effort and debating worth it.

If you are interested in meeting with atheists and freethinkers in Louisville or in other areas of Kentucky, take a look at The Kentucky Secular Society and Louisville Atheists and Freethinkers.