Tell Me What You Want

A while back, I offered people one of those pain-for-funds incentives to donate to Skepticon. Apparently, however, Slyme Pit poetry is too painful for most or all of you.

That’s fair, but it still leaves Skepticon in need. As of right now, with less than two weeks to go before the conference, Skepticon still needs to raise $7,000 to cover their costs for this year. That’s a lot.



People reading this blog probably aren’t going to be able to donate all that money. (If you can, great! Go for it!) Still, whatever you can do would mean a lot to me, as you might be able to tell from my willingness to trawl slime for “poetry”. I’ve made my own donation and added Skepticon to my list of regular monthly donations, but we need a lot more than me.

Why should you donate to Skepticon? Several reasons.

  • Skepticon is free to attend. That makes it one of very few atheist/skeptic conferences to be affordable to everyone who can get there and the only conference of its size to be. We talk about what we can do to promote equal access. Skepticon organizers works their asses off year round to make it happen, but they can’t do it without us.
  • Skepticon is held in the Bible Belt. For some of us, that means a chance to debate with the earnest fundamentalist Christians who picket the event. For others, however, Skepticon means getting away from that reality people live with every day. For them, Skepticon is a chance to relax, come out of the closet, and hang out for a few days with people who see the world more or less as they do. In keeping with my prior point, yes, other conferences do come to the South, but they’re either not free or they’re a lot smaller.
  • Skepticon works at speaker diversity. Did you know the main stage speaker list this year is 50% female? Most Skepticon speakers aren’t paid, but those who are paid are speakers who otherwise couldn’t afford to come. They’re the speakers who you’re not going to see everywhere but who are doing interesting, important work to make sure that secularism, humanism, and skepticism don’t limit themselves to reaching a very narrow demographic.
  • Skepticon is the only free atheist/skeptic conference I know of that offers “professional” development for people in the movement. The Friday workshops (disclosure: including the 10 a.m. Ada Initiative Ally Skills Training that I’m co-leading) offer practical–and sometimes just fun–information on getting through life without belief or on applying critical thinking skills from people with impressive backgrounds in their topics. Many of these are aimed at making people better activists. We don’t see enough of this outside the SSACons and the CFI Leadership Conference. We don’t see it anywhere for free.
  • Skepticon is a labor of love. I’m all for people getting paid for their work, but that’s not the reality today. Skepticon is run by year-round volunteers who also happen to be generally amazing people. We should make this easier for them by making sure they don’t have to substitute more labor for money.
  • Your reason here.

What does that last one mean? That means I’m still willing to put in extra work for those of you who donate. You don’t want pit poetry. I get that. So tell me what it will take to get you to donate to a conference that does unique work of the kind we all say we want.



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Tell Me What You Want
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3 thoughts on “Tell Me What You Want

  1. 1

    I made a small contribution, and what I want is for you to simply consider, privately, if “What are you, besides being an atheist?” might be a better way to ask the question “Why are you an atheist?”

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