“Having a baby made me an atheist”

There’s an excellent article at Offbeat Mama on how having a child spurred one mom into reevaluating her religious views. It’s a great read and a refreshing alternative to the typical “Witnessing the miracle of birth convinced me we had to be intelligently designed!” emotional nonsense I frequently hear. Here’s just a snippet:

“Everything changes when you have a baby,” our relatives and acquaintances said, but they missed the point: everything had changed already. It was the baby, that fuzzy blur on the sonogram screen, pushing us further and further from our old world view.

We were both raised and baptized Seventh-Day Adventists. We attended church, prayed and read the Bible. We had both had doubts about religion in the past, but we had put them aside, believing that what our faith gave us was more important than the answers it couldn’t provide. When our daughter was born, though, those elusive answers began to seem more important.

I read the gospels while breastfeeding, feeling safer in the New Testament with Jesus’s reassuring compassion than in the Old Testament with its endless wars and wrath of God, but I was not reassured. Had the Bible always been so inconsistent, so violent, so sexist? Had it always needed so much adjustment to fit with my own sense of right and wrong? I tried to stretch my faith, twisting it like the rubber band I had looped through my buttonhole to give me a few more weeks in my pre-maternity jeans, but it didn’t fit. I tried to ignore my questions and doubts as I had in the past, but there was a new question I could not ignore: What am I going to teach my daughter?

For those of you who are parents, did you have similar experiences? Or general religious issues that arose when having children?

I’m coming to New York City!

I’ll be in the Big Apple from Wed, August 18th to Wednesday, August 25th – yep, that’s the new travel destination I hinted at earlier! I absolutely can’t wait! I’ll be busy with something super exciting on the 18th and 19th – you’ll find the exact details why later today when I have enough time to properly squee*. This cruel teaser post is for three things:

1. What awesome things do I have to see in NYC? I’ve never been there before. My brother and sister-in-law live in Brooklyn and are prepared to show me neat places, but I’m still open to suggestions.

2. Since invariably someone will ask me this whenever I’m traveling…If I have any readers in/near NYC that want to meet for a pub night, now’s your chance to speak up in the comments. Please let me know which nights (20th through 24th) do or do not work for you. It’ll be somewhere in Brooklyn or Manhattan, depending on what works for people.

3. If anyone know how to hook me up with a ticket for the Daily Show or Colbert Report, I’ll give you my undying love/immortal soul/one million internet points. Not just people with connections – tips on finding a ticket are appreciated. I’m dying to go, and I’m willing to exploit boobquake for a seat if necessary (“But Colbert Report staff, you talked about me on the show! Surely you can sneak me in? *puppy eyes*”)

*If you’re a friend who knows what it is, please humor me by not ruining my dramatic suspense in the comments :P

Today’s hint of male privilege

I’m currently watching Chopped on Food Network. I love FN because I like to cook and it’s basically food porn, and I love Chopped because people always have to be super creative with the bizarre ingredients they give them.

But my first thought when this episode started was “Wow, all the competitors are women!”

There have been tons of episodes with all men, and never once have I thought “Wow, all the competitors are men!” Why? Because we’re used to having women be underrepresented in most fields, including as professional chefs.

Just something to chew over.

…Yes that horrible pun was intentional.

Atheist donates $5,600,000 to NY Catholic schools

From Bloomberg.org:

Retired hedge fund titan Robert W. Wilson lost his faith in God years ago, yet he believes in Catholic schools and gave $5.6 million to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York this summer.

It’s the latest of many gifts from Wilson to the city’s Catholic hierarchy and educators, this one aimed at funding the Catholic Alumni Partnership, a program he founded that helps elementary schools track down their 750,000 alumni and recruit them as donors.

“Most of what the Catholic schools teach are the three Rs,” said Wilson, 83, in a phone interview, referring to reading, writing and arithmetic. “And they do it better than the union-controlled inner-city schools.”

You know what would help make those union-controlled inner-city schools do just as good of job? Giving them $5.6 million dollars. He may be concerned with the three Rs, but Catholic schools have a forth R he’s forgetting about: Religious indoctrination. Gah.

Over at Friendly Atheist, Hemant asks what everyone thinks about this. I’m going to have to side with the “FFFFUUUUUUUU” option.

Blog Makeover

Just to give you guys a heads up, I’m giving Blag Hag a bit of a makeover. It was getting a bit too hodge podge and cramped for me, and I wanted room for larger photos and videos. Hopefully this will look a lot more slick and organized.

If anything looks glitchy, it’s because I’m tweaking it throughout the day, so please be patient. And if you have any suggestions, feel free to post them here. If you think it’s fugly but have no advice on how to improve it, feel free to keep that to yourself ;P

EDIT: Whoops, Disqus commenting has been reinstalled. Sorry ’bout that. Seems to be working now, though I lost a couple of comments that you posted in this thread (I saw them at least!). It’s not working on the About page anymore for some reason, but I’ll see what I can do.

Strippers give church protesters a taste of their own medicine

This definitely goes down as a Win in my book (emphasis mine):

The battle that has heretofore played out in the parking lot of George’s strip club – the Foxhole, a run-down, garage-like building at a Coshocton County crossroads called Newcastle – has shifted 7 miles east to Church Street.

Every weekend for the last four years, Dunfee and members of his ministry have stood watch over George’s joint, taking up residence in the right of way with signs, video cameras and bullhorns in hand. They videotape customers’ license plates and post them online, and they try to save the souls of anyone who comes and goes.

Now, the dancers have turned the tables, so to speak. Fed up with the tactics of Dunfee and his flock, they say they have finally accepted his constant invitation to come to church.

It’s just that they’ve come wearing see-through shorts and toting Super Soakers.

They bring lawn chairs and – yesterday, anyway – grilled hamburgers, Monster energy drinks and corn on the cob. They sat in front of the church and waved at passing cars but largely ignored the congregation behind them.

[…]The women don’t come here, after all, without their own version of religion. They bring signs with Scriptures written in neon colors:

Matthew 7:15: Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing

Revelations 22:11: He that is unjust, let him be unjust still

Greg Flaig is executive director of the Ohio Owners Coalition, a group of showbar and club owners. He called the women’s protest extraordinary, saying he’s never heard of anything like it in the country.

George said the protest has been a long time coming. He sued the church in federal court several years ago, claiming a violation of his constitutional rights, but he lost. Now, he said, turnabout is fair play.

“When these morons go away, we’ll go away,” George said. “The great thing about this country is that everyone has a right to believe what they want.”

Maybe next time religious groups try to be the Morality Police, they’ll remember they’re not the only ones allowed to hold protests…

Niece of Martin Luther King Jr. compares gay marriage to “genocide”

What a shame that a relative of a great civil rights leader would be spouting such vitriol about gays. Dr. Alveda King was one of the speakers at the National Organization for Marriage rally that just took place in Atlanta. Not to be outdone by the other hateful nonsense being peddled there, Dr. King threw in her own two cents:

“It is statistically proven that the strongest institution that guarantees procreation and continuity of the generations is marriage between one man and one woman. I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to be extinct and none of us wants to be. We don’t want genocide, we don’t want to destroy the sacred institution of marriage.”

Because marriage is only about making babies. Which is why people have to take a fertility test before receiving their marriage license. And why marriages are required to end once a woman hits menopause. And why we poke holes in the condoms of couples who don’t want children.

You know what really guarantees procreation? Sex. Regardless if it occurs after you’ve signed some paperwork or not. If Dr. King is concerned about this, I’m sure she’ll quickly add how she’s all for unmarried couples having children, right? Or is she just worried that a small fraction of society showing their love for a partner of the same sex will magically turn every human being on the face of the planet gay?

Ironically, if she was really concerned with the extinction of Homo sapiens, she would be a bit more concerned about overpopulation and it’s potentially disastrous effects. You know, something gay people don’t usually contribute to.

I’ve become a bit of a world traveler lately

I didn’t realize how much traveling I’ve done until my dad pointed it out to me the other day. Sometimes I take for granted how many awesome travel experiences I’ve had – not many people get to escape their country or even their state, but I’ve been all over the place. And by age 22!

Because I’m a nerd, here’s a nice image of my travels. Red represents places I’ve lived, green represents places I’ve physically been in but didn’t actually do anything special there (aka, drove through/changed flights there), and blue represents places I visited with a purpose.
Some random observations:

  • I’ve only lived in two states. I lived in Illinois until I turned 2, and our house was about 10 minutes from where I grew up in Indiana, so I’m not sure if that even counts. And I only went to college an hour and a half away from home.
  • I’ve visited five foreign countries – Mexico, the Bahamas, Greece, Italy, and Vatican City. Our plane stopped in France for a couple hours, but I’d love to go back actually do something there. Well, I’d love to go back to any part of Europe. It was awesome when I was 12, and I’m sure I’d appreciate it even more now.
  • Despite living here, apparently I avoid the rest of the Midwest like the plague. Notice the green circle of states that I have driven through to actually get somewhere cool. And the only reason I’ve been to Kentucky and Ohio is because awesome Secular Student Alliance stuff has happened there in the last year.
  • Going off of that, it’s sort of mind boggling to me how I haven’t visited some places. How have I never been to Canada? Or Wisconsin?! How the heck did I hit up Greece and Alaska before places I could drive to in a couple of hours?
  • Almost all of my domestic traveling took place not only during college, but thanks to college. The only states I had been to prior to going to college were Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Florida. For example, here’s a map of the reasons why I traveled to each state. Blue is for a biology conference/field work, green is for grad school visits, red is for atheist related stuff (yes, I traveled within IL and IN for that), and purple is just for pleasure. You can see that while I enjoyed my travels, the vast majority were not just for fun and were either partially or fully funded by scholarships, my lab, universities, or blog readers (yay TAM!). I’m very lucky indeed.
  • Speaking of being very lucky, in a month my map will have to be updated again. I’ll be living in Seattle, so Washington state will join the places that I have lived in. This weekend I’ll be visiting St. Louis, MO, so then I will have properly “visited” it. And later this month I’ll be flying to a state I’ve never visited before for something super exciting – but you’ll find out about that soon!

Are any of you big travelers? Have you visited or lived in any especially awesome places? Where are you dying to go?

Oh, and since invariably when I talk about traveling someone asks “When are you going to visit _____?!”… Convince someone to help fund my trip and I’d be happy to come talk to your local godless group. I know, positively shocking that grad students aren’t rolling in the dough. ;)

Come see me at St. Louis Skeptics in the Pub!

If I have any readers near St. Louis, MO, I’ll be in town soon! This Saturday (August 14th) I’ll be speaking at The Skeptical Society of St. Louis’s Skeptics in the Pub about Boobquake and its aftermath. It starts at 7pm and is being held at Jack Patrick’s, which is at the intersection of 10th and Olive in downtown St. Louis. We’ll also be hanging around for some drinks afterward, so it should be fun!

There’s a meetup.com event here. I hope to see you guys there!

My super secret spy mission to a Focus on the Family event

Friday night I embarked on a top secret mission with Hemant of Friendly Atheist (who has his thoughts on our adventure here). Hemant brought the event to my attention. Because I like him so much and I’m a bit of a masochist, I agreed to tag along. We headed to Wheaton College in Wheaton, IL for the Focus on the Family Celebrate Family Tour:If you’re not familiar with FotF, you should be tipped off by the fact that “Family” is in their name. I’ve ranted about them here before – about them calling Harry Potter witchcraft, spreading misinformation about gay parenting, and wasting money on misleading pro-life Super Bowl ads. I’m not exactly a fan of this conservative Christian organization, but I was willing to listen for a night out of curiosity and the desire for blog fodder.

Hemant and I had some fun hyping this up in our minds. …Okay, so it wasn’t exactly a spy mission since anyone could attend and when we signed up we used our real names. Yeah, awesome spies. But I still had the Mission Impossible theme song playing through my head, and we even made up aliases. I was his wife (woo, take that fangirls!) who was trying to show my heathen husband why Christianity was so awesome. We picked 3/14 as our anniversary because we’re nerds and that’s the only date we could remember.

We later discovered we were terrible spies because 1) A good Christian woman would have taken her husband’s last name, 2) We didn’t have wedding rings, and 3) I know diddly poop about acting like a Christian. I also tried to fit in by wearing my Sunday’s best, but I later realized the new Christian fashion is all about capris. Seriously, every woman there was wearing capris. I think this was just a ploy to get me into a skirt for the first time in years.

Proof for the skeptical. Also, yay Christ and his kingdom.

Hey, at least we were smart enough to take Hemant’s car. My Darwin Fish, Obama sticker, and Republicans for Voldemort sticker probably would have given us away.

Anyway.

I’m not going to spend time discussing certain Christian tropes that you hear all the time (“It’s not about you, it’s about God,” “God saved me from death! …but not from breaking my legs,” etc). 1) I’ve discussed them before, and 2) I can discuss them later – they’re not exactly specific to this particular event. So even though many things had me facepalming, I’ll save them.

The event had about 1,000 people in attendance. It opened with FotF President Jim Daly sharing some personal stories and explaining the different programs that FotF organizes. FotF is known for its rabid pro-life and anti-gay marriage stances, so I was impressed by how much good they actually are doing (or at least attempting to do). I wasn’t aware that FotF was so active in encouraging adoption* or providing marriage counseling (though we could debate how useful Christian counseling is over getting counseling from a psychologist…).

*(An aside on the adoption thing. Apparently one of the higher-up officials with the Colorado adoption agency, a Dr. Sharon (missed her last name), told FotF that “The best homes for these kids are Christian homes” and wished there were more of them. This may have been said in confidence, but wow. Kind of not a good thing if a government employee is viewing a certain religion as superior when deciding who gets to adopt children.)

I have to give them props for being aware of this problem – people not knowing about their good works. They mentioned it several times throughout the night, and stressed the idea that “If we want people to believe in Christianity’s message, we need to show them the actual good it’s doing.” Again, we could debate if that message is true or not, but I’m all for Christians being less hypocritical when it comes to being moral/doing good works.

Some of the stuff he said was definitely silly though. Apparently 9 year olds are never supposed to say “no” to their parents. Yep, train your children to be good little unthinking drones! Oh, and Nick at Night is horrible television for your child to be watching. That explains why I turned out the way I did. Thanks a lot, I Love Lucy.

The main part of the program was with Dr. Emerson Eggerichs of Love and Respect Ministries and his wife Sarah (…is it bad that this makes me think of the Ministry of Love from 1984?). They mostly discussed the following quote from Ephesians 5:22-33:

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything… 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

Of course, when I say “they,” I mean Emerson did almost all of the talking while Sarah just sat there and looked pretty. I’m not sure why she was even there, other than so they can say “Look, we’re progressive and including women in our discussions!” …Except not really.

Emerson’s main message was that this passage wasn’t about submission, but about the different ways men and women communicate. He claimed women desire to be loved, and men desire to be respected. This claim was “supported” by a poll FotF did of its members – not exactly a scientific study of all men and women. During conflict, when women feel unloved they respond with disrespect, and when men feel disrespected they respond by being unloving. This starts what he refers to as the “crazy cycle” where a fight will just escalate until, apparently, someone realizes the Bible is telling them to stop.

While I appreciate the attempt to say this isn’t about submission (but not some of his pot shots at feminists), it’s still just replacing one stereotype about men and women with another. Great, women don’t have to “submit” to men – but we’re hyper emotional beings that communicate completely differently. He even referred to women as having “Pink glasses, pink hearing aids, and pink megaphones.” Next time someone doesn’t understand me, I’ll try to put away the pink megaphone, I guess.

This part of the program got kind of old after a while – Emerson just basically repeated the same thing for an hour. But then we got to see the comedian Jeff Allen perform. He was actually really funny – we were a bit doubtful at the beginning what a “Christian comedian” would be like. Some of his jokes were about God or religion, but they were ones anyone would find amusing, even a couple of atheists.

I should say, he was really funny most of the time. At the end of his act he felt the need to lay the evangelizing on thick, and tell a serious story about how finding Christ saved his life, etc etc. It wasn’t lame because it was about Jesus or Christianity – I was eating up the rest of his skit. It just…wasn’t funny. His job was to be a comedian, so it just came off as totally awkward to get up on his soap box. It would have been equally awkward if a comedian started going off on how awesome atheism is without actually making any jokes.

Not to mention this was the one moment of the night someone decided to take pot shots at atheists. I made sure to take some quick notes on what I learned about myself:Yep, the whole atheists are depressed canard. It never gets old, does it?! Hemant and I decided we weren’t living up to our atheist standards, and we needed to angst and shoot up heroine more. Or something like that.

There were a couple of general things that struck me as odd, from the perspective of an outsider looking in:

1. Well, feeling like such an outsider. Even though no one knew Hemant and I were a couple of atheists (I promise we were respectful through the whole thing), I still felt out of place. As someone who was not brought up in a Christian household, there are just so many cultural things I don’t know about. Certain phrases or ideas seemed to elicit unanimous mumbled praise from the audience… usually the phrases that I found particularly silly or contemptible. And the way all heads instantaneously snapped down when a prayer started was just odd to someone who hasn’t been trained to do those mannerisms.

Not to mention the inside Christian jokes. Apparently Lutherans are very “cerebral”, and this titillated the audience. Anyone care to explain this in-joke to me?

2. FotF seems to think that any sign of interest is equivalent to winning over supporters. They’ll probably love this blog post if they find it. I don’t know if this is wishful thinking or purposeful spin, but it popped up a lot. For example, Daly made a comment how the former President of the National Organization for Women supported FotF’s right to have a pro-life Super Bowl ad. Daly quipped with a grin, “You know something’s going on,” referring to her support. Yeah, an understanding of freedom of speech is going on.

Another example of this is when they mentioned how 27 non-Christian Comcast staff members were helping them film one of their events. The staff mentioned they had never heard religion discussed that way before, and asked for more information. More information does not automatically mean you converted all of those people – but that’s how FotF framed it. I often ask for more information from religious people when I think they’re particularly wacky, not correct.

3. The Christian Veneer. I can’t get over this phenomena. Most of what FotF was saying throughout the night in terms of families and relationships with your spouse was fairly relatable and sane. It was the same sort of advice you’d hear from many secular self-help books like the typical Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus idea (as untrue as that may be).

…But then they had to go and slap Jesus all over it. Is it not enough to just love your spouse, respect their feelings, and compromise a little with them without having a Bible verse telling you to do it? Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and atheists have the same problems and the same solutions. It’s not the Bible that’s giving you the answers – you’re just cherry picking things from the Bible that happen to fit your solution… after you’ve come to it.

4. They didn’t mention gay marriage at all. Hemant and I were both really disappointed. We figured with their fervent anti-gay marriage stance and the recent Prop 8 ruling that they’d be sure to say something. Nada. I guess it just wasn’t the topic of the night. But if anything, I’m now convinced we need more gay marriages because of this event. I mean, the whole thing was about how marital strife comes from men and women inherently communicating differently. If it was a man communicating with a man or a woman communicating with a woman, no problem, right?!

5. All the speakers seemed genuinely nice. This shouldn’t be shocking, but FotF has some platforms that are so nasty that it’s sometimes hard to separate the people from the ideas. I constantly have to remind myself that Christians go out of their way to evangelize and fight for their specific morals because they truly believe in them and care about people. It may be misguided and ultimately harmful, but they’re really doing it with good intentions. I’m sure any of the speakers would be great to chat with over tea… I just don’t want them making any sort of laws. Nor will I stop criticizing their viewpoints just because they’re trying to be nice – it just helps to know where these people are coming from when you do have to debate them.

I’m still no fan of FotF. While they’ve become a bit humanized to me, I still can’t support most of what their organization is doing. Adoption is awesome, but not when you only think heterosexual Christians make good homes. Marriage counseling is great, but not when you assume all other religions are doomed to have failed relationships. Continuing to perpetuate myths about atheists is…well, not so hot. And hell, one of their college programs focuses on teaching students about creationism and intelligent design – it was difficult for this evolutionary biologist to not start facepalming in the middle of the event.

You know, it would be nice if people from FotF would attend some of our godless events. Maybe we could become a bit more humanized, instead of representing depression and debauchery.

…As much as I do like debauchery.