Now you know what I did last week: a quick review of the Global Atheist Convention 2012

Right now, in my bleary, jet-lagged state, I thought it would be a good moment to scribble down what I found most memorable about the Global Atheist Convention.

  • First and foremost, the attendees. It’s an unfortunate characteristic of conference organization that the speakers get all the attention…but of course, they’d be nothing without someone to listen and occasionally shout back. I had the best time outside the conference, talking to all those swarms of jubilant godless folk.

  • Christopher Hitchens. He’s gone, but both Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss gave excellent testimonials. And the very best is this video, Hitchens distilled down to his sharpest, most acerbic self.

  • The organizers. Whoa, but this conference was smoooth — everything on time, we speakers were pampered and tended and delivered on stage professionally, the conference center was lovely, and there wasn’t a hitch in sight (and no Hitch, either, but not their fault). I’d be interested to hear the attendees perspective, but I don’t think this was an event where they felt neglected or bored either.

  • The humor. This has become a signature of atheist conventions: we don’t have hymns, we don’t have a liturgy, but we do have comedy (which sometimes misfires horribly — bitter misogyny is not funny — but OK, exploring the boundaries will sometimes lead to failure). Our godless future is apparently going to have us laughing a lot.

  • The protesters. We had a couple of Christian groups and one Muslim group appear outside the conference hall with microphones and amplifiers, at which time they howled at us. Note, they did not talk with us — it was all top-of-the-lungs screaming about how much they loved Jesus and how much they wanted to decapitate Ayaan Hirsi Ali. They came off as desperate, stupid, and pathetic…thank you very much!

  • The weirdness. This is a combination of the attendees and humor: Australians are a wild and crazy lot. So yes, Martin Pribble and I had a hug-off.

  • Profit! OK, this was a little odd; I didn’t find as much time to do podcasts with rational Australians as I’d have liked, but I got collared by one persistent fellow with a professional video rig and a cameraman and taken aside for about an hour of solid recording in an interview. Afterwards, I signed a release and he gave me a great big wad of cash, to my complete surprise — so much cash that all my incidental expenses for this trip were covered, and I came home with a nice bit of extra money. Weird. And then later I was informed that my interviewer was a Seventh Day Adventist and creationist, so you can expect that interview to come out in little edited dribs and drabs in the future. It felt like Expelled all over again.

    It was kind of silly, too: I would probably have given a sharper, pithier interview if I’d known what it was about. At least I was able to pass on warnings to other speakers at the conference afterwards.

  • Australia. We did find time for a little sight-seeing: a museum, the zoo, the aquarium. It’s a lovely continent. I wish plate tectonics would hurry up and send it a little closer to us, though — it’s far too far away.

  • I had an interesting evening with Stedman and Cannold. What can I say that’s pleasant about Stedman? He’s a very, very nice guy, and he would be an excellent liaison to the religious community if only he’d stand up for secularism rather than this interfaith bullshit, which simply panders to wacky people with ridiculous beliefs.

    I have to say, though, that my highlight of that evening debate was the after-party at Embiggen Books. Now that is a bookstore; I wish they were all that good. Imagine a bookstore with all the New Age dross and religious self-help wankerism swept away, and all that was left was the intelligent stuff. That’s Embiggen Books.

  • The future. I am optimistic. We keep growing, the people are happy and ambitious. We are going to win. You’re all going to the next GAC (the organizers, I’m sure, don’t even want to think about that right now), which will be even bigger, right?

Bleh

We got back safely last night after about 24 hours of travel from Australia. I slept like the dead. I am now risen and staggering about zombie-like, and will now lurch off to my 8am class.

You aren’t expecting new content here for a little while, are you? Really?

Why I am an atheist – Kassiane

I am an atheist because there is no god.

I was raised in an increasingly religious environment–the parents I grew up with took us to church every week (Catholic & eastern Orthodox), and they sent us to Catholic schools. I listened, I tried to believe, I memorized everything they told us in Religion class & tried to understand how people believed it.

But I could not believe.

After my parents split up, my mother became gradually more religious. Here’s the fun part: I am autistic & have temporal lobe epilepsy. My mother went from a bit off to absolutely convinced that I was possessed by demons. Eastern Orthodox don’t even really do the exorcism thing-certainly not the way evangelicals do-but I had not one, not two, but three exorcisms. Being waterboarded with holy water is still being waterboarded. Could any really loving god allow this, or my mother’s increasing use of church and marathon prayer sessions as punishment? I’m thinkin’ not.

So I survived years of abuse because “god told me to do it”. No god I knew or was told about would do that, but I kept trying to believe. I got straight As in religion class. We had to pass a religion test to graduate high school; I scored high enough to get “advanced scholar of catechatical knowledge” on my diploma.

Yet still I had doubts.

That summer I went to an Eastern Orthodox church camp to coach Special Olympics for a week. Being teenagers, all of the volunteer coaches snuck out of our cabins and stayed out way too late. I was surrounded by kids with whom I should have a lot in common, except they seemed to have no doubts at all, while I saw all the ritual as a routine, but nothing that meant anything to anyone but the people doing it.

It hit me that I am an atheist that summer. We were laying in the outdoor volleyball court looking for shooting stars. It was beautiful-I had never seen so many stars, and had certainly never seen so many shooting stars. We were all very quiet except for the occasional muttering about the beauty of God’s creation–and at that moment I knew, absolutely KNEW, that there was no god who put all those stars there. There was no god who made us and the plants and the stars and the things so far out we did not know about them. It was so vast and beautiful that saying some guy in the sky (but not really the sky-some kind of other dimension or something) put them there just for us was far too conceited and just didn’t make sense. There’s so much out there humanity may never experience, and no one put it there, and that was far more awe inspiring to 17 year old me than “goddidit”.

I was born an atheist, I couldn’t learn not to be, and reality is so much cooler anyway.

Kassiane

Practicing time travel

I’m in the Melbourne airport, about to depart on a 9:30am flight to Los Angeles, which will arrive at 7am today. I’d suggest that we keep going around and around and wind the clock back a few years, except that the only effect of time travel seems to be exhaustion and confusion, and I’ve had enough of that for a while. See you in a more familiar time zone tomorrow! I mean, today! I mean…I don’t know. I’m going to just close my eyes and see when I end up.

Why I am an atheist – Wayne K

My parents were Catholic, as was their parents, and their parents, etc. as far back as anyone in the family can remember. When I was about 4 or 5, it didn’t understand mass or any of the other rituals and ceremonies that make up Catholicism. I know that I hated going to church, catechism, confession, communion, and all that stuff. But I was sometimes terrified that I might die in my sleep and go to Hell because I wasn’t in a “state of grace.” When I was about 5, my mother told me that Catholics had to suffer in life and that only Catholics went to Heaven. Wow, what a horrible thing to tell a 5 year old! I went to church and catechism every Sunday, and I mean EVERY Sunday. There was no “go or else”, there wasn’t any “or else”. At about 12, I began to doubt all the teachings of the church, but didn’t really know if I believed or not in a god. When I left home, I also quit going to church and told my parents I didn’t believe in any of “that stuff”. My parents practically disowned me for a time. Thereafter, for most of my adult life, religion wasn’t a part of my life and didn’t think about it. I didn’t know or associate with anyone that went to church. I probably did know people who went to church, but they didn’t talk about it. I went to my father’s funeral mass only to please my mother and swore I would never go to a mass again and I haven’t.

When I was 44, I married a woman who was about as Catholic as the Pope. Probably more Catholic because she really believes on all that bullshit. I doubt the Pope does. He’s just another ambitious politician who used religion to gain power and status. My wife and I argue religion all the time, but this hasn’t had a really bad effect on our relationship. At least she finally stopped nagging be to go to church.

But then we moved to northwest Arkansas, part of the Backward, Baptist, Bible, Belt. Here, there’s church on every block, people talk about their church, their religion, their Bible, their Bible study class, their choir practice, etc. etc. constantly. I got so tired of being told in person and on the TV, that the Bible says this and that, that I read the Bible, the ENTIRE Bible, to see what it said. Makes me sick. The best source I know of for turning a believer into a non-believer, is the Bible. The people who are always quoting the Bible and how it is the basis for morality, obviously haven’t read the Bible. If I were god and someone said that I wrote it, I would be insulted. I also read much of the Koran. By the way, Arkansas is one of seven states that has an unconstitutional state law requiring a belief in god to serve in a public office or on a jury. I know this is the law and from personal experience. I was excused from jury duty for refusing to take a religious oath. Arkansas doesn’t say which god you have to believe in, but then you’re given a Christian Bible to swear an oath. Doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, a non-believer, or whatever.

After reading the Bible, I started reading about other religions and also I read Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris , Dennet, plus the writings of religious people. I tried reading a book titled, “I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist.” I read about half of it and couldn’t read any more it. Total bullshit, circular arguments and nonsense. For example, “God exists because the universe exits.” “All religions claim to be the true religion”, (true). But in the next paragraph, “of course, Christianity is the true religion.”

I don’t know why people are called Agnostic.

In reality, everyone is an Agnostic. Agnostic means, no knowledge. That is what we have about Heaven, Hell, and an afterlife. Of course religious people “know” there is. Religion enables people to know things that are impossible to know.

In summary, if one studies religion, which of course the clergy forbids, one can only come to the conclusion that it’s all a lie.

Wayne K

“Undeniable” denial

I didn’t attend the Christian “Undeniable” event that was supposed to happen in Federation Square in Melbourne last night. They were dishonest and boring.

The gang of Christians did show up outside the Melbourne convention center after the Global Atheist Convention, and commenced chanting and howling: they passed a microphone around and bellowed their thanks to Jesus at a loud volume, while their fellows closed their eyes and waved their hands at the skies. They looked awesomely foolish. There was no attempt at conversation; they couldn’t, they just had their scripts to recite. But as has been typical of all the religious demonstrations at the GAC, they just amplify their own voices and ignore everyone else, which kind of defeats the point, I would think.

After their circle jerk was over, one fellow started ordering people to get into small groups and march over to the square. He made the mistake of passing his microphone along, so I managed to ask him some questions.

“Why are you here at the atheist convention, rather than at Federation Square?” He answered that it just happened to be a convenient place to meet. He was a liar. Of course he was at that particular place because he wanted to testify to atheists.

“Who were you people talking to over your microphones?” He said they were just talking to each other. Again, a lie. It’s obvious that they were putting on a public display of piety. When I pointed out that their shrieking was all addressed to their god in the sky, he just shrugged. Someone else corrected me and said their god was everywhere. Which made me wonder why they needed to amplify their voices, and why they were all looking and raising their arms skyward. I guess God is hard of hearing.

“What do you hope to accomplish with this loud howling at your god?” And with that, they all scurried away.

I don’t see how I was supposed to ask them their story when all they were prepared to do is deny their purposes and scream at an invisible god. So I blew them off and didn’t bother to follow them to the square, where they’d just blindly babble anyway.