 May 1, 2012 at 8:41 am  Hank Fox
Thanks to Barry Andrew for the heads-up on the following image:
From their website: “The North Georgia Falcons are a homeschool football team with high school and middle school players. We play football in the Glory For Christ football league, which is made up of Christian School teams and Homeschool teams.”
The lead post at the Glory for Christ Football League site — “Our purpose in life is to give glory to God!” — is at the moment a large ad for the concussion-preventing Guardian football helmet. That’s just slightly ironic, you have to admit (Wait, you say you want to give glory to God by playing football, but you’re not willing to risk everything for Him?), but I’m not going to make too much fun of it. At least they’re not attempting to pray away concussions.
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Doing a search for the origin of the photo, I found these comments on the New York Times website, a couple of letters to the Sports Editor:
Re ”Home Schooling, Home Teams,” June 26: Perhaps the home-schoolers need to rethink their Priority List, as ”3. Acedemics” and ”4. Atheletics” are misspelled on the sign in a photograph accompanying the article.
and
I prefer to think that it was an act of kindness rather than an oversight that compelled you not to notice the misspellings in the North Georgia Falcons Priority List. I commend you on your forbearance. As to the priorities listed on the sign, it is painfully clear that spelling ranks nowhere near the top.
However, the picture referred to does not at present appear with the article, leading me to believe it was scrubbed by a kindly editor, possibly after being contacted by certain embarrassed parties.
May 1, 2012 at 8:17 am Hank Fox
This is the piece that appeared in the Albany Times Union newspaper this last Saturday, in the Voices of Faith column on the Faith & Values page. (Interestingly, it used to be the Religion page, and I suspect the change reflects some sort of sea change in understanding that “values” can come from someplace other than religion. Which is progress, and which I attribute directly to newly-vocal atheists making that very point.)
The two other main stories on the page were “Pope orders crackdown on nuns” and “Faith lost, then found, strengthens Troy mayor.” (Troy is a local city, a once-upon-a-time industrial giant located next to Albany.)
I titled my piece “Being Good Without God: The Option of Atheism” / the editor renamed it Atheists Aim for Goodness.
April 29, 2012 at 11:36 am Hank Fox
I love/hate this kind of thing. Either way, it’s often worth a laugh.
I’m sure you have your own unfavorite misspelled signs, posters, etc., from the goddy demographic. Send me some links! Let’s start a collection.
April 28, 2012 at 8:53 am Hank Fox
I wrote a piece for my local newspaper some weeks back, and it came out today in the Times Union newspaper of Albany, New York: Atheists Aim for Goodness.
Anytime you have a letter or an opinion piece on atheism in your local paper — something well worth doing, by the way — you get a storm of letters in response. Nice Christians diligently explain why you can’t possibly be right, and how you have no logical basis for your atheism, and even how there are no such things as real atheists.
The following week, some nice local priest, or a nice rabbi — both sure to have actual college degrees in the finer points of religion — point out the desperate flaws in atheism, which is, after all, a religion just like any other. Besides which, Hitler and Stalin.
But meanwhile, if you’ve done it right, somewhere out there a 15-year-old girl reads it, or a 19-year-old guy, or a 35-year-old mother of two, and goes, “Exactly what I was thinking! I’m not alone!”
Or at least “Hey … um. I never thought of that. Hmm.”
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By the way: If you’re a Schenectady or Albany resident and got here via the link at the end of the article, you may want to know about these three local organizations:
Capital Region Atheists & Agnostics
Capital District Humanist Society
Capital District Skeptics
Each of these groups is filled with bright, kind, interesting, involved people who can answer questions, tell you more about what they do, or help you get involved at the local level in helping us make a better world.
April 27, 2012 at 10:09 am Hank Fox
 Kudos to the lot of you! I’m more than a little pleased with how the discussion worked out in comments to my Liberal Knees post about the burkha.
All of the comments were thoughtful, most were lengthy, and none of them were flames against me or the other readers/commenters.
Best of all, I learned some stuff, and I hope others did too. There were more nuances in the issue than my simple formulation of “I don’t get to wear a mask in public; I don’t think anyone else should.”
Most telling was the argument that Muslim women, arguably already suffering the repression of being forced to wear the burkha in the first place, were the ones being legally penalized for … well, wearing the burkha. Definitely something worth considering.
April 23, 2012 at 5:12 am Hank Fox
 Look at this picture (click to embiggen) of a woman arrested in France for refusing to remove her veil. A tiny, defenseless woman, a plucky warrior for the rights of a minority to live and breathe free, is manhandled by racist government thugs.
It came up on my Facebook wall recently, from a group called the Muslim Defense League (MDL) United We Stand, Divided We Fall (“Fighting against racism, fascism and oppression”).
The photo caption was “A Muslima is arrested in France for refusing to remove the veil! If you are against this act then Share it everywhere!”
April 22, 2012 at 2:08 pm Hank Fox
Big-screen this and watch.
April 22, 2012 at 1:01 pm Hank Fox
 I went to the “great debate” – Does God Exist? – last night at Binghamton University in Upstate New York. The event was double-hosted by the Campus Bible Fellowship and the Secular Student Alliance.
Ex-Mormon Erin M. and I caught a ride with Michael McElroy, all members of the local atheist Meet-Up group, Capital Region Atheists and Agnostics. Nice trip, the both of you. I enjoyed the wide-ranging conversation immensely. Sorry I fell asleep on the late-night return trip; hey, I’m old. —Oh, yeah, also saw Rick Martin, one of the CRA&A founding members.
McElroy has an excellent recap of the actual substance of the debate on his own blog.
I’ll post the YouTube videos when I see them up. Don’t know when that will be. But meanwhile …
I thought Matt Dillahunty (host of The Atheist Experience) did a fantastic job against Christian apologist Jay Lucas.
Matt was thoughtful, open, generous, honest and funny.
April 21, 2012 at 3:00 am Hank Fox
[This is a reprint of a piece I did several years ago, slightly edited for 2012.]
 Leaf One
Con games and sleight-of-hand magic work because, one, we humans only have so much attention to spare at any one moment, and two, they direct that attention deliberately in one direction. If you look at where the finger points, you miss … well, everything else.
Like the movie teen backing through a darkened doorway in the serial killer’s lair, we focus intently on one thing while something more important takes place just outside the sphere of our focus.
I’ll give you a real-life example that has bugged me for a long time.
April 20, 2012 at 9:18 am Hank Fox
This is the speech I would have given, if I’d been asked to speak at the Reason Rally. No, there’s no reason anyone should have asked – I’m not well enough known just yet – but that didn’t stop me from wanting to be up on stage anyway. Saying this:
Hank’s Reason Rally Speech
 Just as we still talk about the Enlightenment, or the discovery of fire, a thousand years from now, people will still be talking about this moment.
Because this is the moment when civilization left the launch pad. This is the moment when we broke free from the restraints of unreason, when the umbilical of religion finally fell away, the moment when the rocket of our true capabilities really began to thrust up into the sky.
There’s still that long, long journey ahead of us. But this is the moment when we made our final break from the insanities of the past, and people a thousand years from now will know it, and talk about it.
Or … they won’t.
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