A lot of people don’t know what atheists are, but they’re sure certain about defining them, and somehow, we’re always so BAD. Ophelia finds a doozy of a redefinition of atheism, but I can top it: Steve Cornell, a pastor at Millersville Bible Church, makes a long list of the sins of the atheist. In it, he nestles himself securely in the Christian tradition of babbling assertively about subjects in which he is completely and manifestly ignorant, but will sell well to his equally ignorant flock. It’s the usual stuff about how it takes more faith to believe in the absence of god, atheists are amoral, they reject “historical proof” (i.e., the Bible), yadda yadda yadda.

Read it for the entertainment value, but I’m afraid I just can’t get motivated to bother to rip it up.

(via Susan Cogan)

Make some popcorn.

Jason Rosenhouse says agnosticism is unjustified fence-sitting.

John Wilkins says he’s still an agnostic.

Larry Moran is egging them on.

Isn’t this fun? Let’s see if I can get them all pissed off at me. The agnostic/atheist conflict has been simmering for a long, long time so it’s always easy to fire up an argument.

[Read more…]

I heard good things about Dawkins’ talk at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, so I let my computer crank away at downloading the video overnight—it’s 113 megabytes! Then this morning Norm of onegoodmove lets me know that there are some shorter clips available from the Q&A: a reaction to the abuse of Quantum Theory,
a disparagment of blind faith, and best of all, his reaction to hearing that
Liberty University labels their dinosaur fossils as being a few thousand years old. The discussion with the audience is always the best thing about these talks, and this was a case where the audience had a number of mind abuse cases from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in attendance.

One thing not in the shorter clips that I thought was interesting was the young woman who asked Dawkins if he thought it was normal that deconversion was accompanied by anger, and he didn’t know…so he asked the audience. And they roar back that yes, it is.

I think Dawkins was being slightly disingenuous. I can believe his own loss of faith was easy and unaccompanied by stress, because my own was, as well. In my own case, my childhood belief was fairly shallow, so when I realized that I didn’t believe any of that baloney in adolescence, it wasn’t at all traumatic. But Dawkins knows as do I that that anger can come later, and you can sense it in Dawkins in the question about dinosaur fossils. I feel that, too. We’re both people whose lives are heavily invested in a university and in teaching and in science, and when you see the kinds of vile fraud institutions of bunkum like Liberty University commit against those three values, I can’t help but feel disgust and anger.

Many people, I suspect, are hit harder with those sensations. If you start with a deeper commitment to a religion, if you’ve been compelled by family to invest heavily in that belief (another horror I was spared), if your deconversion is prompted by learning that you’ve been betrayed and lied to—then I can understand how anger is an early and strong part of the process.

All I can say is that yes, you should be damned angry. I am glad that many people are beginning to feel that fury.

There will be no poll. It’s presumptuous of me to even suggest coming up with a symbol for freethought, and seriously, this is a small corner of the internet, with a small subset of godless people, and the ones who’d respond to a poll would be such a tiny fraction of the possibilities that it would be meaningless.

So instead, we’ll have discussion. Reason with each other.

Here’s the agenda: make an argument for your favorite, and sway me. Whatever symbol gets the most persuasive argument (and actually, the argument that larger numbers of people will like your symbol will have some weight with me), I’m going to use. Look ever to the left sidebar, where it says “Profile”—at the top of that, the symbol will appear at about the same size as the box with my face in it, and it will link to some godless manifesto (Russell’s? My own? I’ll think about it later). That’s all I’m aiming for at this point.

If it is successful, that means that some other bloggers start using it, putting a discreet or blatant symbol somewhere on their pages that link to an explanation. The hope is that readers will wonder what that odd squiggle is, click on it, and learn something.

If it is wildly successful, it will achieve fairly general recognition so that readers won’t bother to click on it anymore—they’ll get used to seeing it and know that the author is one of them goddamned freethinkers, and they’ll scurry off or settle down and read for a while. This is the most hopeful scenario, and I’m not counting on it; attempts to make that kind of widely recognized association fail much more often than they succeed.

So, what I did was simply skim through the suggestion thread and pick those symbols that generated some degree of repeated interest, and that also met my general criteria of being reasonably simple and easy to scrawl out. I stripped out colors and shading as well as I could and reduced everything to a high-contrast gray scale, and then scaled them all to about the same size…and show here some large ones and some tiny ones. If people want to get fancy and produce elaborate, full color versions with the flayed skin of Hypatia stapled to the sides and Robert Ingersoll’s happy face peeping out of some space, that ornamentation can be done later and on your own—the goal now is to get a framework that is recognizable.

a period
affinity
asterisk
circle
dna
empty
galaxy
infinity
natural
phi
pi
spiral

So, talk about it. Please don’t get hung up on details of the rendering—think of this as something that ought to be recognizable if it were chalked onto a sidewalk, for instance, and the final version that would go on a website can be cleaned up and made sharper—and let’s avoid new suggestions, unless you’ve got something utterly stunning and brilliant. Let’s just hash these out right now.

Another useful datum would be to let us know if you would use such a symbol on your weblog, or some other place. That’ll help us get a feel for the potential for wider use.

Richard Dawkins was interviewed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and whips out some of his standard ‘arrogance’.

Q Here are quotes about faith from two thoughtful Twin Cities clergy members. What is your response to each?

The Rev. Greg Boyd, pastor of Woodland Hills Church in Maplewood: “I thirst for water, and water exists. I hunger for food, and food exists. I hunger and thirst for God, so I concluded that God must exist.”

Dawkins: The fact that you hunger and thirst for something does not make it exist. A young man ravaged by lust might hunger for a woman he believes loves him back, but she just doesn’t, and he can’t make it so by longing for it. It’s silly to assume that wanting something means it exists.

Roman Catholic priest and liturgist the Rev. Michael Joncas: “I am willing to embrace what science and knowledge offer us. Yet what has inspired me since early childhood is a great sense of holy mystery.”

Dawkins: Scientists thrive on mystery, on investigating it. But we would not use the word “holy.” To call life’s mysteries holy and imply that they have something to do with God is unhelpful and misleading. Among the things Roman Catholics call holy mysteries are the holy trinity and transubstantiation. But those things are myths.

Actually, that doesn’t sound arrogant at all to me. It’s more like clarity in stark contrast to the stupidity of a couple of “thoughtful” priests. Shouldn’t Christians be a little embarrassed at the vapidity of their representatives?

In another Twin Cities connection, we’re getting a warning.

Christian author and philosopher Os Guinness warns of a growing atheist backlash to the political strength of Christian conservatives.

In an interview with a radio station in St. Paul, Minn., Guinness said he doubts that atheists have grown more numerous, but he believes they’re now more organized and determined to press their case against religion and its influence in society.

Well, yes. Isn’t it about time? The only question is, when the “intelligent, educated segment of the culture” goes on the attack, which side are you going to be on?