Why I am an atheist – Helen Nicholls

As a young child I used to wonder why I existed at all. The thought made me dizzy. I considered the only answer I knew, that God had created it but it was not satisfactory. I also thought about death. I remember the moment I realised that one day I would die and that when that happened my consciousness would ceased and I simply would not be. The thought overwhelmed me and made me feel sick. I clutched at the easy answer; that I would go to Heaven. In order to believe that I had to believe in God as well and so I did. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It is only with hindsight that I realise that it was the fear of death that made me push away all my doubts.

[Read more…]

Atheists, secularists, freethinkers: vote for these secular charities

Chase Community Giving is handing out almost half a million dollars in a great big blatant popularity contest — it seems like a very poor way to distribute funds, and you know what I think of online polls. But hey, it’s their money, and they’ve come up with this scheme to distribute, so who are we but poor peons to play the game. Greta Christina has the details. The bottom line, though, is that you each have TWO votes through your Facebook account (if you don’t have a Facebook account, get one just so you can vote!). Pick two of the three secular organizations below and vote for ’em.

It’s a bit weird: when you vote, you get a link that you can share via email, facebook, google+, whatever, and if other people vote using it, you get credited for another vote. So spread the word and share the links.

There are various tiers of success, so we don’t have to get first place to get some money for our favorite groups — but we’re in competition with others, so we do have to push to get into the best tier we can.

Vote, vote, vote. I know these polls are usually utterly pointless, but at least this one has a chance of getting a good group a substantial reward.

Such a fine line between stupid and clever

Kitty! Jaguar Macho B in 2009.

I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this article: it’s either one of the silliest pieces of writing I’ve ever seen on endangered species issues, or a fiendishly clever way of roping ecologically apathetic adolescent d00dz into getting behind a conservation issue:

Usually, endangered species stories are lame. It’s some stupid owl or lizard or some other animal that nobody actually cares about.

Not this time. This time an animal actually worth caring about it [sic] getting some protected habitat. And if we’re really lucky it’s going to maul a few hikers.

The writer’s referring to a proposal last month by the US Fish and Wildlife Service that 838,000 acres of rough terrain on the US-Mexican border be designated Critical Habitat for the jaguar, the result of a lawsuit by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) in Tucson. The designation covers mountain ranges stretching from the Tohono O’odham Reservation eastward to the southwesternmost corner of New Mexico. Jaguars were pretty much extirpated from the US  early in the 20th Century, but there have been sightings of male jaguars over the years in parts of the proposed critical habitat, including one sighting and capture in 2009 that ended sadly.

Not mentioned in the d00dz-targeted article linked above: the largest impact of the critical habitat designation, if it’s approved, will likely be to cause problems for the proposed Rosemont copper mine in the Santa Rita mountains. CBD says the mine is its main concern with regard to protecting Arizona jaguar habitat. In response, in a statement likely to provoke wry smiles around these parts, a Rosemont Vice President accused CBD of bullying.

In any event, despite the enthusiasm of the Uproxx writer linked up top, the designation doesn’t mean we’re getting more jaguars: it just makes it somewhat harder to damage jaguar habitat with the federal government’s help.

So: stupid or clever? Uproxx writer Dan Seitz at least makes an effort to drop a little science, and he doesn’t get it completely wrong:

One theory maintains that peripheral populations are key to maintaining a species’ biodiversity. Species that live on the very edge of the range tend to develop new traits and evolve in different ways, then interbreed with other populations and pass on those useful mutations.

“Key” is an overstatement: some people do in fact suggest that peripheral populations may well be important for maintaining diversity in some species, but that certainly isn’t the only factor involved. Still, I wonder if I shouldn’t credit Seitz for slipping a little bit of science into a publication that features stories like this one, which is probably not safe for work even though it doesn’t involve stupid owls or lizards or some other animal that nobody actually cares about.

What can you do about a rebellious woman who will not submit to her husband’s authority?

Pat Robertson was asked that question. His answer was simple: you’ve got to stand up to her, and oh, how he wishes he could announce on television that you should beat her.

Well, you could become a Muslim and you could beat her. … This man’s got to stand up to her and he can’t let her get away with this stuff. I don’t think we condone wife-beating these days but something has got to be done.

How clever! To simultaneously advocate domestic violence while distancing oneself from it, and at the same time get in a little Muslim bashing! Who says Pat Robertson is senile? He’s not — he’s just evil.

But he’s wrong. You don’t need to be a Muslim to beat your spouse; we’ve got relatively few Muslims here in mostly lily-white Minnesota, and we’ve still got a tremendous number of domestic violence cases.

  • One in every four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. 1 One in 33 men have experienced an attempted or completed rape.

  • An estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner each year.

  • The majority (73%) of family violence victims are female. Females were 84% of spousal abuse victims and 86% of abuse victims at the hands of a boyfriend.

And then there’s this juicy statistic: in Minnesota alone in 2006,

5,295 battered women and 5,131 children used
Minnesota emergency shelter services.

Were they all Muslim? Hey, Pat, maybe you can crack a joke about how those 5,000 women and children have learned a little something about submission and respect.

Around FtB

I scan the main page of Freethoughtblogs every day, and here are a few of the stories that caught my eye this time around.

Why I am an atheist – Inflection

When I was very young, my Dad combed my hair.  I don’t know why; perhaps I was hilariously bad at it.  But it meant that we had a few minutes one-on-one in the morning before he went to work and I went to daycare or the like.  We would talk about whatever was on our minds.  It was on one of these morning that we broached the subject of first cause, or, as a young child would put it, where everything comes from.  He explained about the Big Bang and the Primordial Point.  I don’t remember the words, but the image in my mind is vivid.

[Read more…]