Why I am an atheist – Stacey Cooney

I was raised as a Roman Catholic but honestly, only in a vague way. My mother never went to church until she married my father. My father is religious, says the rosary before going to bed, but also hated going to church, especially if there was singing. (Mostly he’s just an old Yankee curmudgeon who doesn’t like people in general.) My parents worked at a state hospital that was basically a nursing home. My mother and I would go to services at the hospital where I would help out with the giving of communion by giving the patients cups of water. It was service to me. I wasn’t an alter girl officially. I just liked helping people and helping to put away the church items-snuffing the candles and playing with the wax and such.

I officially became an atheist around 6th grade. I realized I really didn’t believe in anything I’d been learning about in CCD or heard in church. It didn’t hurt that I’m chemically sensitive and the church we started going to around that time used incense and we always managed to sit near someone who bathed in perfume. I spent a large amount of time standing in the foyer with time to think. For me CCD was basically school…you read the textbook, did crafts, took tests, memorized things…got grades. Standard school stuff. I think the thing that stuck with me, and really cinched it for me, though was this ridiculous explanation of “Hell” from ‘Father Mike’ (clearly one of the new school priests). He said that Hell was like an ice cream shop where all your favorite flavors were present but the spoons were too big to use and no one would help you. I still remember this vividly to this day. It was the stupidest thing I had heard up until that point in my life.

After I told my parents they were, blessedly, totally supportive. I’m sure they were disappointed but they knew me well enough to know that I meant what I said and would only change my mind if I came to a new conclusion. Again, it didn’t hurt that the Deacon of the church called my parents on more than one occasion to try to convince me to come back. (I’d left right before the final test of the CCD year and the year before confirmation classes.) My mother tried to explain that I’d stopped believing in God. He didn’t seem to care…as if it were not an issue or that he was sure I would change my mind.

I’ve never looked back. I think I’m one of those people who didn’t have the ‘god gene’ or something. I don’t think I ever really believed. I don’t ever remember fearing hell or worrying about sinning. The thing I remember from my childhood is spending years making sure my hair was over my ears before I went to bed because I saw Star Trek, the Wrath of Khan too young and feared insects would crawl into my ears if they weren’t covered. That was my Devil. The dreaded earwig. I still get an instant fight or flight response if I see one.

Stacey Cooney
United States

Irish Catholic perspicacity

I can still be astounded at what the religious say. In Ireland, Michelle Mulherin provides an astonishing insight into a pressing problem.

Fornication was the single greatest cause of unwanted pregnancies in Ireland.

Good to know. I’m going to suggest a few other revelations for Ms Mulherin.

Driving was the single greatest cause of auto accidents in all of Ireland.

Drinking was the single greatest cause of alcoholism in all of Ireland.

Living was the single greatest cause of dying in all of Ireland.

Catholicism was the single greatest cause of ignorance and stupidity in all of Ireland.

Deal with it.

Help Talia!

She’s four years old. She has a crippling congenital disease. She needs a wheelchair. Chip in a few bucks if you can.

If you’re interested in that sort of thing, she has congenital pseudoarthrosis — it’s a malformation of a limb bone to form a pseudo-joint. Basically it’s a broken bone that doesn’t heal together, with the broken ends instead healing over to form a false articulation…it’s like trying to walk around with a permanently broken limb. It’s treated surgically, either with splinting (which doesn’t always work), or amputation. It’s serious stuff, and a wheelchair is just part of the necessary work to give a little girl some mobility.

Here be monsters

One wonders how Kevin Forts identifies a “moral conscience” and “heroic actions”. Forts is an American supporter of Anders Breivik. Apparently, he considers premeditated mass murder to be moral, and thinks a real hero gleefully hunts down and shoots unarmed teenagers.

He certainly has a hard time facing the camera. He’s one of a small minority that is so fearful, that they excuse gunning down innocents as a step in genocide. Not a nice person at all.

I see he’s also attending a Catholic university (which has quickly disavowed any support for his callous and amoral views). Aren’t Catholics supposed to follow those ten commandments?

Please, people on my side, don’t make arguments this bad

Uh-oh. Nick Matzke doesn’t like that recent paper by Jerry Coyne on the causes of creationism. It is telling, though, that Matzke’s reasons are terribad. He lists four.

  1. Theodosius Dobzhansky was a Christian and a scientist, therefore he was an accommodationist, therefore…I don’t know, what? How does that refute anything Coyne wrote? No one is claiming that it is impossible for people with screwy personal beliefs to be significant contributors to science.

  2. Darwin was an agnostic, and he would be called an accommodationist today, therefore…again, this is a meaningless argument. Neither Dobzhansky nor Darwin were infallible. Matzke seems to be trying to salvage accommodationism by arguing that people who were significant contributors to science in key domains could not possibly be wrong in others.

  3. Coyne relies, Matzke claims, on claiming that religious people aren’t allowed to endorse natural mechanisms as a method of God’s action. That argument is false and incoherent. Of course religious people can endorse natural mechanisms: every good scientist, of which Matzke has mentioned two, endorses natural mechanisms. Where his argument falls apart is in this bizarre notion that you can simultaneously claim that a mechanism is natural and that it is driven by a supernatural entity. OK, show me such a thing. Show me evidence that mutation, for instance, is the result of a god diddling DNA.

  4. Matzke just doesn’t like that word “accommodationist”. At the same time, though, he claims that accommodating religious beliefs to science is a good thing, so presumably the word isn’t so bad, then. What he doesn’t recognize is that accommodating religion to science means jettisoning supernatural explanations, which we flaming atheists would also say is a most excellent thing; the problem, though, is that accommodationists instead make excuses to modify science to fit their religion…for instance, claiming that quantum indeterminacy is god’s way of tinkering with life.

Then he wraps it all up by questioning whether atheist interpretations of evolutionary biology ought to be allowed to be published in good journals of evolutionary biology, because it isn’t “serious”. That’s ironic. Apparently, it is serious to promote liberal Christianity as an ally of evolution, as the NCSE does.

Those are all pathetically weak “arguments”. Matzke ought to be embarrassed to have made them.

Autism blog poll

You’ve seen this phenomenon before: some flaky point of view wraps itself up in one of the trio of disguises, god, country, or family, and uses that to excuse stupidity. Here’s a case in point: a blog called “Thinking Mom’s Revolution”, in which the first word is a complete lie. It endorses homeopathy and chelation therapy for autism, which is, of course, caused by vaccination. But Motherhood! How can you question a mom?

Right now, that blog is the top candidate in a competition for the top blog about autism. This must not happen. The second runner-up (and it’s very close), is the Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, in which the first word is not a lie, and which promotes an honest science-based approach to the issues.

You know what to do.