AAI: Atheists are very nice people

They also enjoy a little something to drink.

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I was pleasantly surprised to discover a bottle of OriginAle: Darwinian IPA and an imperial stout, Gudeløs, waiting for me when I checked in. The Danish contingent wants me to come out to their big meeting in June in Copenhagen…I am so there. Bribes were completely redundant.

The RDF is also giving the speakers bottles of merlot, nicely personalized with etching. Now I have to decide whether to drink it or save it…ah, I think I’ll drink it and save the bottle.

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In the non-drinkable category (really! That’s not what we’re all about, and I haven’t seen a single drunk atheist this whole weekend!), the pleasantly surly people at Surly-Ramics gave me this lovely necklace with a familiar motif.

Thanks everyone!

AAI: I am an ACTOR!

Just not a very good one, but you’ll see for yourselves. I spent the morning in heaven, which consists of a well-lit white screen in Southern California, trying to master my lines for a future Mr Deity episode. That stuff is harder than it looks. We went through many takes while my brain was freezing up at inopportune moments — there’s a reason not everyone is a movie star, that’s for sure.

Anyway, “Lucy” and “Mr Deity” are actually Amy and Bryan, and they have a nice house with a couple of kids, two dogs, and a cat, and the episodes are filmed in the family room. I hope I haven’t shattered any of your illusions. Amy made me pancakes, I think because she’s very nice, but it might also have been to load up the klutzy professor’s sputtering brain with carbohydrates so that maybe he’d remember his lines.

I made it through it all, though, and I’m hoping that Mr Deity will be able to work a miracle and make me look good with some creative editing. You’ll probably see the results next week. It can’t possibly be worse than Expelled!

By the way, he mentioned that they’re hoping to build up the budget to make a half-hour pilot, which would be awesome — Mr Deity as weekly dose of broadcast irreverence for American living rooms would be an excellent and entertaining corrective. Support them if you can!

AAI: Thank you!

I mentioned that Dennett, Dawkins, and I had dinner together tonight. Someone — and all we know from the waiter was that it was a woman — sent a nice bottle of wine to our table. I know I speak for both Dan and Richard when I say thank you, anonymous lady! It was appreciated!

AAI: Evolutionary Genealogy

One other exhibit in the hall was for Evolutionary Genealogy, an excellent site run by Len Eisenberg of Ashland, Oregon. I was in Ashland a while back and got a tour of the geology walk he installed there, which is phenomenal — look it up if you’re ever in town.

He’s selling posters and t-shirts to support his work in evolution education. One of the hooks he uses to get people interested is to talk about relationships in the great big family of life on earth, and he estimates the number of generations that separate us from any organism you might be interested in. He’s got nice shirts that show how closely related you are to that animal; wouldn’t you know Jerry Coyne got in there early and snatched up the kitty-cat shirt? I got a dragonfly, because invertebrates are always much cooler.

AAI: evening award ceremony

Can I call it a ceremony? It wasn’t very ceremonious at all.

We sat down first to watch a live video stream of Bill Maher’s show, with special guest Richard Dawkins. It was good, it was funny, it was abrasive, and Maher didn’t say anything crazy at all. Dawkins did not get much of an opportunity to say much, again; that’s a problem with some of these shows, like Colbert, where the personality of the host leaves little room for the guests. Dawkins acquitted himself well, though.

After the Maher show, we got to listen to Mr Deity. This was pretty darned cool; not only did he show video clips, but the whole cast was there, and they recreated a couple of the episodes live. We learned that Lucy is, in real life, married to Mr Deity, which would seem to mean that Satan is actually Mrs Deity. The theological implications of this revelation were not discussed, but should have been. Mr Deity is also an ex-Mormon, yet another bit of theological dynamite that will no doubt shake all of organized religion to its core.

Maher and Dawkins arrived near the end of Mr Deity’s talk, and I know that’s what everyone wants to hear about. I was seated at the same table with Maher, but sadly, there was no opportunity to have a conversation with him. Dawkins introduced him, he gave a short speech, he got surrounded by a photograph-taking mob, he left.

The good news for all the critics of this choice is that Dawkins pulled no punches. In his introduction, he praised Religulous and thanked Maher for his contributions to freethought, but he also very clearly and unambiguously stated that some of his beliefs about medicine were simply crazy. He did a good job of walking a difficult tightrope; he made it clear that the award was granted for some specific worthy matters, his humorous approach to religion, while carefully dissociating the AAI from any endorsement of crackpot medicine. It won’t be enough, I know, but the effort was made, and talking to Dawkins afterwards there was no question but that Maher’s quackery was highly objectionable. I also got the impression that he felt the critics of the award were making good and reasonable points, and that he felt the awkwardness of the decision.

Maher’s talk was hilarious, too. He’s definitely one of us in his opposition to religion’s influence on the culture, if nothing else.

OK, and just to make you all jealous, I went out to dinner afterwards with Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett. If it makes you feel better, Dan had some criticisms of my talk — I was arguing that it’s a mistake to talk about design in evolution, Dan wants to salvage the word from the hands of creationists and thinks we can talk about design without implying intent at all. I am not convinced, but he does make an interesting case.

AAI: Maurice Bisheff

This was definitely the weirdest talk of the meeting so far.

Bisheff was discussing Tom Paine, that fascinating patriot and rabble-rouser of the American Revolution. Atheists love the guy; he wasn’t one of us, since he was a deist, but he was a real firebrand in his opposition to organized religion. I think a historical analysis of this important figure in American history is the kind of thing we ought to encourage in freethought meetings; we aren’t all about finding contradictions in the Bible and going rah-rah for science, you know.

Unfortunately, this was a very academic talk, following the convention of formal papers in many branches of the humanities: he stood up there at the podium and read from a paper. Yikes. He lost a lot of people early, who just walked out of him in boredom, I’m sorry to say. I’m especially sorry since they missed the weird turn it took later.

Bisheff wanted to emphasize that Paine was not an atheist (which was fine, since he wasn’t), and went on to discuss some of his ideas about science, and nature, and god, and the afterlife. Again, not a problem, since he had those ideas…except that Bisheff seemed to want to regard them uncritically, as good ways of looking at the world, and he seemed to be enjoying taking a few potshots at atheists. And I’m sorry, but Paine, as described here, had some wacky beliefs.

He tried to justify some of the ‘spiritual’ views by claiming that they were like the premises of mathematics, lacking an empirical foundation and not susceptible to proof by materialists, because they reside in a plane outside of mere worldly matters. That was annoying enough in its lack of connection to reality, but then he proceeded to tell us about true science and scientists. Apparently, a true scientist of the future (we aren’t ready for this yet) will incorporate the mystical as well as the natural in his vision of the universe.

That woke me up from the snooze of the talk format.

I eventually asked him a few questions. I suggested that science is a rather pragmatic and methodological practice, so I’d like to know how we were to study the mystical. I also told him that while I didn’t disagree that Paine had these spiritual views, it would be truer to the freethought that he endorsed if we did not simply accept the opinions of Tom Paine, but that a critical analysis would be far more interesting.

I got a rather rambling reply back. Apparently Tom Paine was a proponent of transcendental science, whatever that was. Bisheff tried to give an example, and talked about a study of baby babbling that showed that some fraction weren’t actually babbling, but were speaking in the tongue of some ancient Buddhist sect. We just weren’t ready to comprehend this fact, and scientists run away from such a phenomenon that we can’t explain. Yeah, we were somehow talking about reincarnation.

The person next to me wondered if we’d somehow wandered into a Templeton seminar. I have to agree, it was crazy inappropriate. However, I would like to be the first to endorse the award of a posthumous Templeton Prize to Thomas Paine, hero of the American Revolution. It seems only fair.

AAI: Robert Richert

I walked into this talk a little late, and was initially unimpressed. Richert was an atheist who fought in Viet Nam, and a lot of the talk was a rather rambling reminiscence with photos of the war; I didn’t quite see the point. At the end, though, it was very affecting. He talked about incidents that made an impression on him: a friend who survived a harrowing firefight, and attributed his survival to a beneficent god; and a few days later, an innocent Vietnamese baby who was killed by shrapnel from a grenade. He made the point that there was no loving god who could have so cruelly thrown away the life of a child, while granting survival to a soldier fighting in the country. Sad stuff with some real emotional punch.

Yes, there are atheists in foxholes. And they seem to be a little more appreciative of the tragedy of war than the blithe Christians.

AAI: Toni Marano

As soon as you walk into the conference hall, you can’t miss the big posters of a semi-nude Toni Marano. She’s selling videos to help with pilates training, and also does “lifestyle intervention”. I just have to say…good for her. It’s an unfortunate fact that atheist conventions are sometimes a little too gray and stodgy, and she’s bringing a little life to the meeting.

Along similar lines, I’m seeing more young people and more women in attendance; not enough of either, but still a good sign of a healthy, growing movement.

So what do you think? Should I buy one of her dvds?

AAI: Russell Blackford

I’ve been very, very busy today, so I’m bringing you a few belated comments about the Atheist Alliance International convention. I have to be brief, unfortunately; tomorrow is another busy day, which will be starting with a session with Mr Deity, so I need to get some sleep sometime.

I met Russell Blackford! He’s a very nice fellow, especially since he gave a talk I could agree with 100%. He was discussing the virtues of blasphemy; he actually made an argument that we have a kind of moral responsibility to blaspheme. He addressed a couple of ideas, actually; one was the issue of how we know whether religious beliefs aren’t true (quickly dismissed; religion is incompatible with the results of rational inquiry), and spent more time with the question of why we atheists should regard it as urgent to loudly say that religious beliefs aren’t true. He discussed the recent attempts by the UN to add special protections to religious belief, which actually contradict personal liberties, and also showed that existing UN guidelines already compromise free speech.

You people should be reading his blog, you know. Good stuff.