Tag Archives: science

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.

IUS Darwin Day 2011

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Last night I had the great pleasure of going to a Darwin Day event with the Freethinkers for Education and Morality at Indiana University Southeast. Yep, now that I am four years out of college new campus Freethought groups are sprouting everywhere, and I am excited! I am particular proud of this event since I introduced the idea and helped plan it.

There were actually two events. At lunchtime, the students set up a booth in the cafeteria to help educate and inform students while they were hanging around between classes. Unfortunately I was busy at work and could not go. However, Ed did go, and from what I heard he was a wonderful source of information and conversation. There students who came to the booth ranged in their responses from “this is cool!” to “Isn’t Darwin that evil guy?” to “Who is Darwin?” It really was a wonderful opportunity to reach out and promote scientific literacy and knowledge of the world.

The evening event included a presentation on the evidence for evolution by Ed, including a discussion of some of the best books to read to satiate one’s curiosity on the topic. Amber, president of the IUS Freethinkers group, talked about the lunchtime event and lead a discussion on learning and educating others in evolution. It was a lot of fun, and I am looking forward to participating in more groups like these in the future.

I have posted pictures of the event at my facebook page: The Skeptical Seeker. Perhaps soon I will have the pictures from the lunchtime event, and I will post them too.

Next, to plan Darwin Day with the UofL Society of Secular Students!

Sentience more important than Life

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When I was growing up, I used to watch “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with my parents almost every Saturday. The shows that appealed to me most were the ones that dealt with some deep philosophical question, and I would keep thinking about these shows long after the episode was over. My favorite character in the show was Data, because he challenged my thinking about what is human, and what is a person. What is life? These sort of questions grabbed my imagination and have never let go.

Just the other day I saw a rerun of one of those episodes, one that I don’t recall specifically having seen before (I seldom remember the individual episodes as I wasn’t paying attention to that as a child.) This was one where the Enterprise was assisting with the setup of some fancy mining apparatus on some planet or other. A female alien had developed a robot to help with repairs and maintenance on the mining equipment. The robots were capable of learning, and could evaluate the situation and create the proper tool to deal with it in an extremely fast period of time. Data was working with her on the project and observed that one of these robots behaved in a way that he interpreted as being as self-preservation by “breaking” itself to avoid being sent into a dangerous situation and then repairing itself later when the danger was over.

This observation leads Data to start wondering if these robots are self-aware and if they may be considered to be life forms. This is a moral problem for him, since if the robots are life forms they should not be used as mere tools and put into dangerous situations without their consent. He goes to the ship’s doctor and asks her “What is life?” It’s an interesting question since he himself is an artificial life form, and she wonders about why he is asking. I liked the way that she answered. She says that no one has ever really answered the question of exactly what life is and what makes a being alive.

While I was going to the University of Louisville, I developed a strong interest in evolution and I registered to take a class called “Unity of Life” which was a class for biology majors on that topic. Since I had a full-time load of 12 hours for the semester, I could take on additional classes at no extra charge. (Unfortunately since I was starting to take difficult upper-level CIS classes, I had to drop my biology course for lack of time.) I did attend the first class though, and I recall clearly the opening discussion for the class. The professor opened the class by asking “What is life?” As it turns out, “life” is not nearly as easy a concept to define as you would assume. In grade school I learned that is something is alive, it means that it grows, metabolizes, reproduces, and passes hereditary material to its offspring. The reason a rock is not considered alive is because it does none of these things. But what about a virus, which is little more than some hereditary material, a protein shell, and a means of transmitting that hereditary material to a host cell? Is that alive?

We have developed our definitions of life by observing things that we consider to be living and describing what they have in common. But that is not a definition, any more than trying to define gravity as that which pulls objects to the ground. That is describing the effect of gravity, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what it is or what causes it. According to the understanding of modern biology, there is not a clear defining line between life and non-life. Look at our own bodies: we are live, our cells are alive, and I suppose the organelles inside the cells are alive. But these things are all made of atoms and molecules, and how could an atom of carbon or oxygen be said to be alive? All living things are made of non-living things. We evolved from the non-living, and we are still made of non-living material. Life is a manifestation of a particular organization of non-living things. When that organization breaks down, we die.

Data was concerned about the definition of life, and whether or not the robots designed to repair the mine were alive. I think he was asking the wrong question. The things that should be considered when determining if a thing should be considered morally is its capacity for sentience. Plants are biologically alive, but very few people would argue against killing them for food or other uses for that reason. What makes a person, a being to be considered morally before we use or kill it, is an ability to think, suffer or feel pleasure. Those are the things that matter.

What Inspires Me

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It’s like the universe screams in your face ‘Do you know how grand I am, how old I am, can you even comprehend what I am? What are you compared to me?’
And when you know enough science you can just smile back up at the universe and reply
‘Dude, I am you!’

One thing on my bucket list is to go somewhere where the sky is really dark at night and get a good glimpse of the Milky Way with my own eyes.

Science and religious ignorance

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The emerging picture of the early Solar System does not resemble a stately progression of events designed to form the Earth. Instead it looks as if our planet was made, and survived, by mere lucky chance, amid unbelievable violence. Our world does not seem to have been crafted by a master craftsman. Here too, there is no hint of a Universe made for us. -Carl Sagan, from Pale Blue Dot

I am currently reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan, and I have just finished the chapter called “Routine Planetary Violence.” This chapter highlights the violent history of the solar system, and the creation of rings around the huge gas giants. The thing that inspired this writing was the part about the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 on Jupiter in 1994.

Unlike many of the events that Sagan recalls in this book, this event happened within my teen years and was all over the news of the day. So I remember it distinctly. I was 14 years old, in the midst of my fundamentalist Christian homeshool lessons from Christian Liberty Academy. I was a committed Christian and a creationist at the time, and was used to interpreting just about everything in terms of Christian belief and the Bible. Including the Shoemaker-Levy 9 incident. So, to my scientifically interested but poorly educated mind, this “shaking of the heavens”* was part of the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and a sign of the coming rapture. I thought it was a confirmation of the Bible.

Of course now I know it ain’t so, and it boggles the mind that I ever thought such things. But it is not surprising that I did because it was all I knew. The Christian leaders and teachers I trusted talked in such terms, and I was much more likely to distrust the adults that give a more simply scientific account of such events. After all, there are those out there who would deceive us…unfortunately at the time I was mistaken about which set of people deserved the label of “deceiver.”

The Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter really was a perfectly straight-forward, and basically routine (on the timescale of about 5 billion years), scientific happening. I wonder if I would have ever realized that if I had not gone on to get a decent college education and find out the scientific facts of the matter. It reminds me of a woman who came to speak with (actually more like scold and preach at) me at the KY State Fair. She said she knew someone who had died at a hospital and had been brought back to life, and that this confirmed that God was real (or something like that). When I asked her about it (“Did her brain actually die?”) she looked like no one had ever questioned her story before and said that her friend’s heart had stopped momentarily and then had been restarted. Of course, a person’s heart can stop without them dying, as long as it is started back up before tissues start dying of oxygen deprivation. At the end of our conversation she just huffed something about atheists having no hope and stormed away. It’s amazing how a person’s mind can be so clouded by religious mythology and superstition that they really can’t see what’s really going on around them. I was a teenager during the Shoemaker-Levy event but I got over the superstitious thinking by the time I was out of college. This woman was middle-aged. I can only guess that, even that that age, this kind of thinking must be all she knows.

*A reference to Mark 13:25

A Preacher’s anti-atheist biases exposed, civilly.

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My husband has been the public face of the Louisville Coalition of Reason since the billboard has gone up. This is a point that I am very proud of. :) We have had numerous positive and encouraging responses from fellow atheists who really thought they were alone in Louisville and are very happy to find that there is a community for them here. Several have joined our meetup group in response, and it is all very exciting!

Predictably, we have also gotten a number of emails from Christians who apparently think they are “lead by God” to show us the error of our ways. A couple of days ago someone sent me this though the “Contact Us” link at LouisvilleAtheists.com:

Hell is not half full and your doctrine will take you there. The path to being saved is Romans 10:9. Denying Christ is a path to damnation.

I have decided that it is too ethically ambiguous to post someone’s name and email along with their messages on my blog without their express permission, so I will refrain from doing so. However, not all think so. My husband was engaged in a bit of an email debate with a local pastor over the past few days…and this pastor has had no qualms at all about posting Ed’s name, email address, and bio from Facebook on his blog right along with their email exchange. Without saying he was going to do so in advance, I might add, or giving Ed a link to the blog when it was published. Nor did he send the last message posted to the blog. We found out about this though a sympathetic friend.

Civil discourse between theist and atheist

I read though the blog, and could not help myself from responding to a few of the things this preacher had to say. He brings up many of the old canards against atheists, such as saying that no one can really be an atheist since the Bible says all know God exists, and he questions how atheists could possibly be moral. Both of these assertions are, when you just scratch below the surface just a bit, little more than displays of bias against atheists. Being moral is a natural part of being human. One does not need to understand the sources of morality to be moral any more than the beaver needs to understand millions of years of natural selection to build his dam. To suggest that any group in society does not know how to be moral is to deny a basic part of their humanity. I’m sure that he knows it’s rather pointless to quote the Bible as an authority to an atheist, so I tend to think that the whole point of this exchange was to try to make an example for his “flock” who reads his blog rather than to have a real open conversation.

I would post comments there, but unfortunately my WordPress login doesn’t work on that site and I didn’t see a place to register. So, if you like, go and read the post, and then add your comments here.

UPDATE: Apparently this pastor had thought he sent the last email, but it was still sitting in his drafts folder. So, I’ll remove that count against him. :) The other stuff, such as publishing Ed’s email address as well as believing and spreading the ideas that atheists are just being dishonest and wicked (’cause the Bible tells me so!) still stand. How does one have a civil and open discussion with someone who believes such things about you? Will they not just ignore and discount everything you have to say?

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.

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.

Darwin Day 2010 at CFI Indy

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Last Saturday I had the great opportunity to go to the Darwin Day 2010 conference in Indianapolis. It’s not the first time I’d made the two-hour trek from Louisville to Indianapolis for a Center for Inquiry event, but it is the largest event that I’ve seen there.

The itinerary for the event is here: Darwin Day 2010. Rather than merely give an overview of what each speaker presented, I am going to give highlights of what I thought were some of the most interesting and notable points. Continue reading →