And now, a brief message from Canada

Dear Friends and Freethinkers,
The Freethought Association of Canada, the charity that brought you the wildly successful Canadian Atheist Bus Campaign, is having its 2010 annual general meeting!

Everyone interested in the FAC and its future is welcome to attend the meeting and participate. We will be voting both on our 2010-2011 Board of Executives, and on a number of very exciting changes to the mandate and bylaws proposed throughout this past year. We will also have a Year in Review report from our current President, Kaiti Kish, as well as our yearly financial report. Finally, a discussion regarding the future of the FAC will be held, where any and all ideas are more than welcome!
Nominations will be held for: president, vice-president multimedia, vice-president special projects, treasurer and secretary. There will be a vote for the creation of two new positions (vice-president external and vice-president internal) if this motion is passed we will carry on with the voting for these positions.

When: Saturday, April 17 2010
Where: Center for Inquiry – Ontario (216 Beverley St. Toronto, ON) however if you are not in Toronto but still want to be involved in the Freethought Association we strongly encourage you to contact us! We would like to expand our executive board across Canada and therefore welcome national participation.
Nominations for the Board positions will be accepted until: Saturday, April 10 2010
Please send all nominations to: president@freethoughtassociation.ca (please include the full name of the nominee, your full name, and the position you would like the nominee to fill)
NO NOMINATIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED AFTER THIS DATE.

Please see our Facebook event for descriptions of the duties of each position and further information.
http://tinyurl.com/y8b4alk

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at:
president@freethoughtassociation.ca or call (647) 267-5780

Subversively charming

This is such a sweet story: a little boy willingly hands out cheerful notes and cookies to his neighbors, simply to make them feel good. It’s such a feel-good story that a Christian inspirational site picks up on it and shares Logan Davis’s good news.

“I wanted to do something to brighten our neighbors’ day,” the motivated youngster told the news source. “My parents have always taught me it’s good to be nice to others.”

What none of the stories seem to mention, though, is that it’s a godless family.

Bwahahaahahaa! Our plans are working: we shall conquer the world with our niceness and our habit of raising happy, well-adjusted children! And cookies and flowers!

Even the nice theologians annoy me

Christ. It’s yet another review of the Global Atheist Convention, this time by a long-winded Anglican priest. I’m being rude in my evaluation despite the fact that it is actually a generous review, because he repeats another of those oblivious stereotypes that always pisses me off. I’ve highlighted my triggers.

I know my atheist colleagues and friends think this way of recognising life is just a form of ‘misfire’, a delusion.  They find support for their view from the natural processes like a tsunami or a congenital disease, which appear to be indifferent to the value of life.  But these are some of the consequences of the processes that produce life.  In conversations with students this quickly leads them questioning my belief in God: ‘why would God use natural processes, including evolution by natural selection, to bring life into existence?’ and ‘why would God use any process at all, why not just create the world in the intended end state, if the world is supposedly created for some purpose?’   Will our faith and theology be up to answering these questions? The answer has to be robust enough to address Dawkins saying the universe is, at bottom, pitilessly indifferent.  I regard these as excellent questions for which there are good answers.  But these would take more than this blog to set out.  It is one part of a larger conversation working out the rationality of faith.  This reference to ‘reason’ is deeply Christian in a Christianity that has reason to believe the divine Logos has become flesh in Christ.    
 

At the end of her vivid, witty segment Catherine Deveney gave us this word: “Seek the truth and the truth will make you free. Don’t be afraid of death. Be afraid of never having really lived.  Peace be with you.”  These are also deeply Christian themes, at least one being a direct quote.   CD says ‘God is bullshit’ – that is her gig at the comedy festival.  Taking a line from Dan Barker, a speaker at the Convention, this is culturally resonant with speaking about God as a shepherd in Jesus’ own day. But could the truth, life and peace she commends to us enter into a conversation with the truth, life and peace that Christians value?  Catherine Deveney, would you be interested in another gig?

There was a phrase I heard all the time when I was living in Utah. If I did something friendly or helpful, the good Mormon would tell me that was mighty “white” of me. It’s the same thing when someone appropriates truth and justice and reason as Christian virtues, and sits around trying to be nice to atheists by telling them how close they come to a Christian ideal.

And they call us the arrogant ones.

I’m not nice. I’m not Christian. And I tell Stephen Ames that no matter how charitable he thinks he is, he comes across as a condescending prat, and he can get stuffed.

Those virtues are human values, they don’t belong to Christianity, and I’m so tired of Christians acting as if they are. Hands off. Ames sat through the convention, noted that many of the speakers repeated frequently that you can be good without gods, and failed to notice that not once did they play his game of pretending that goodness is an atheist property. We don’t delude ourselves that way. We also know that reason is a virtue grafted onto a religion that is primarily concerned with irrational faith, and is entirely evidence-free.

It’s his patronizing attitude that is a significant part of the moral conflict. By once again trying to tie morality to Christianity, he perpetuates the myth that marginalizes atheists.

I have to mention the flip side of this problem. I enthusiastically grant that Christians can and do embrace what I consider human cultural values, and I do not consider religion to be a necessary obstacle to doing good. The best of Christianity dedicates itself to those wonderful principles of social justice that some read into the Jesus story (I’d add that this is the very same thing I find commendable in communism). Rarely have I encountered anyone who does not regard social justice, equality, and fairness as virtues…except in the pathological extremes of libertarianism and far right conservatism.

It turns out there are people — even influential people — who seem to be dangerous sociopaths from my perspective. Roger Ebert has a fascinating essay on Glenn Beck. Beck is, apparently, an amoral being who rejects the common interests of all humankind.

What are the words “social justice” code for? Why, Nazism and Communism, says Beck: “Social justice was the rallying cry–economic justice and social justice–the rallying cry on both the communist front and the fascist front.” Beck even went so far as to cite Jesus Christ, saying, and I quote: “Nowhere does Jesus say, Hey, if somebody asks for your shirt, give your coat to the government and have the government give them a pair of slacks.” Well, Beck has me there. It is quite true that nowhere does Jesus say that. Nor, for that matter, does he ever say, A wop bop a lu bop, a wop bam boom!

What I would enjoy hearing is one single clergyman from any faith in America, appearing on Beck’s program to agree with him and denouncing social justice. Such a person might be a real piece of work. I suspect he might currently be in between congregations. Beck’s oversight is that all religions teach social justice. That’s sort of what they’re about. “My church doesn’t,” said Beck, who is a Mormon. Not for the first time, he was dead wrong, and the mountains of Utah rang with the thunder of outraged Mormon elders. I know now, and did not know before, that before statehood the Mormons in the Utah territory provided universal health care and care for the poor as a matter of their duty.

You want to identify an issue on which atheists and liberal Christians can find common ground? There it is. Just don’t try to pretend that only Good Christians are the proprietors of moral behavior.

I was dumber after listening to that

You can now listen to the recent debate between Cardinal George Pell and Dan Barker. It will convince you that the Catholic church is totally lacking in any intellectual criterion for appointing cardinals.

Practically the first words out of Pell’s mouth are “God as creator and chance or the only two options as an explanation for the universe” and “For atheists the universe is a product of blind chance.” We can just stop there: what about the hypothesis that the universe was spawned from super-dense farts of a trans-cosmic supranatural cockroach? But then he goes on to the argument from selected authority (Antony Flew, of course) and fine-tuning. Pell is not a physicist, he barely understands the concept, so it’s rather silly for him, as a supernatural dogmatist, to rely on a physical argument. And of course we get the “cells are so complex!” argument.

Barker was good, but he was like a bandage slapped on top of a penetrating head wound. Better to avoid the damage altogether.

A clarification of Dawkins’ comments

The comment that has stirred up the most condemnation from the press is Richard Dawkins’ mention of “Pope…Nazi,” which everyone assumes was about the current Pope. Wrong. Everyone knows the current Pope is most properly addressed as “Pope Palpatine”. No, Pope Palpatine is not currently up for canonization (at least, I hope not), but there is another pope who is, and this thorough discussion explains who Dawkins was actually talking about.

Blatantly evident in this clip, Richard Dawkins uses “Pope Nazi” as a shorthand descriptive phrase for “that Pope whose name I’ve forgotten (Pope Pius XII) — who’s also up for canonisation and was aiding and abetting the Nazis during the war”.

And here’s the clip.

Richard Dawkins from Young Australian Skeptics on Vimeo.

Oh, and Pope Pius XII really was a sniveling rat bastard who should have been held accountable for contributing to the evil perpetrated against the Jews.

Bad, bad media

The media are lashing back. The post-convention media (with the exception of one article in the Australian) has been abysmally bad, relying on tried-and-true excuse-making from religious apologists. It would be nice if they actually had conversations with atheists rather than immediately running to the nearest cathedral for consolation, but I guess that’s what they have to do now. After all, the convention was an unqualified success, a real triumph for the atheist movement, and they just can’t have that.

Barney Zwartz is a concern troll. He’s a believer; he presumably thinks religion and god and all that crap have some value; so why is he trying to give us advice on how to make atheism more effective?

Here’s my advice. If atheists can reduce their contempt for believers and work harder for their positive goal — reducing the footprint of religion in society — they may begin to exert more of the influence they feel they deserve.

OK, Barney. Here’s my advice for you: put away the writing career, join a monastery, and pray, pray, pray. It will advance your cause!

Of course, why should a believer trust my advice on this issue? I want you to go away. It’s the same with Zwartz. Complain away, at least that’s being honest about your own opinions; but playing the game of offering grandfatherly advice to a movement you detest is insincere and obnoxious.

Oh, and what you consider unworthy doesn’t interest me much. Explain why.

Also unworthy were ABC science presenter Robyn Williams offering “a devastating argument against religion in two words: Senator Fielding”; former Hillsong member Tanya Levin: “I’m finally getting to hang out with the adults”; and Rationalist Society president Ian Robinson, asking whether there were any believers in the audience. “OK, I’ll speak really slowly.” (Wild applause after each.)

What was missing was any sign of self-deprecation. Atheism will be a mature movement in Australia when atheists can laugh not just at the religious, but at themselves.

For instance, you could try to defend Fielding — that would be interesting. Fielding is the fellow who believes the earth is 6000 years old, after all, because his religion tells him so. The religious should be embarrassed by him.

As for laughing at ourselves…we did. There was quite a bit of humor aimed at our own little group. It’s just that the wacky, goofy religious nuts are so much funnier. Religion will be a mature movement when it can stop providing so much juicy material for comedians, although, given that you’ve been struggling with that problem for a few millennia, I don’t offer much hope.

Speaking of jokes, here’s a punchline for you: Melanie Phillips. She’s the deranged religious nut who rants and raves about atheists being totalitarian fundamentalists, and who is now making a career out of her hatred of Richard Dawkins.

Just why is he so angry and why does he hate religion so much? After all, as many religious scientists can attest, science and religion are — contrary to his claim — not incompatible at all.

A clue lies in his insistence that a principal reason for believing that there could be no intelligence behind the origin of life is that the alternative — God — is unthinkable.

Melanie Phillips was not actually at the Global Atheist Convention. I specifically addressed her argument about compatibility from propinquity — it just doesn’t work, because it means that everything must be compatible with everything else in the most trivial way. I also have not heard Dawkins ever claim that God is unthinkable, or that there is no possibility of intelligence responsible for the origin of life — quite the contrary, these are possible alternatives which we simply reject because there is no evidence for them.

It’s always a bad sign when the only way you can make a point is by lying about what the other person said.

Phillips is always a source of amusement, though.

Through such hubristic overreach, Dawkins has opened himself up to attack from quarters that, unlike the theologians he routinely knocks around the park, he cannot so easily disdain.

Books taking his arguments apart on his own purported ground of scientific reason have been published by a growing number of eminent scientists and philosophers, including mathematicians David Berlinski and John Lennox, biochemist Alister McGrath, geneticist Francis Collins, and philosopher and recanting atheist Anthony Flew.

Uh, yes. We can easily disdain them. Berlinski, Lennox, and McGrath are not serious contributors to the debate; Berlinski is a popinjay and Lennox and McGrath are wacky theologians. Collins’ arguments for religion are fallacious and trivial, and Flew is in a sad state of senility.

Here’s the worst. ABC news spent half their brief coverage with shots of a communion ritual at a church, and got some smug idiot in a dog collar named Philip Freier to give his opinion of atheism, and got it all wrong.

Here’s the priest’s brainfart:

It will be interesting to me to see how something that is framed around a largely negative concept, atheism <self-satisfied smile>, is capable of developing a coherent position.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The central concept of modern atheism is the importance of evidence. We have seen the remarkable success of evidence-based reasoning, and have noticed that religion doesn’t seem to use it…that the only negative concept here is the fundamental premise of religion, faith. Evidence and reason are not negative concepts, except perhaps in the minds of faith-heads who have replaced them with a vacuum and gullibility.

We’ve also been waiting a long, long time for religion to develop a coherent position. Their failure so far suggests that they are incapable of doing so.

Sunday Sacrilege: Magic words

Words are the great ju-ju — some apparently believe we have the power to call up Satan and summon the lightning with the choice use of language. One of the common quirks of many Christian and Jewish sites on the internet is the insistence on writing G_D, as if including an “o” turns the word into a Rune of Power, is an expression of disrespect, or perhaps instills some strange fear in the writer. It’s God as Voldemort, and all I can say is F_CK THAT.

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